Long Hugsville

He of the coffee-coloured waist-length dreadlocks, over-fed pecs and hemp trousers, Adonis, and she of the saintly expression, bare midriff and colossal bosom, Persephone, are hugging in the centre of the main path leading into the garden café. Greenpeace pin-ups! Not your average shabby tree dweller. Hugee and hugor sway backwards and forwards and from side to side, enjoying the mutual sensation of each others embrace while customers sip soup and break bread inches from their hips. I can’t take my eyes off them. The passing trade finds themselves having to navigate off the path in order to make their way to the bar. I begin to get an uneasy sensation. Are they for real? It’s hard to say around here. After a long minute, or so it seems, I want to interject. Take your devotion to satsang, or get off the bloody path will you! Their complete disregard to the people movement chaos they’re causing gives me the shits. I’m feeling embarrassed, and getting prickly. One minute ten, twenty … Two minutes down and they’re still grafted to each other. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with public displays of affection. Mum did. I don’t. Persephone’s peach and lilac skirt blossoms over the path, while the scent of the patchouli oil she’s poured over herself sends the resident water dragons scampering up the central poinciana tree. Adonis is impressively big, as big as the muscular presence of cheetah on the savannah. Clearly he thinks this his urban savannah. A waiter sidles up with a loaded tray, ‘Excuse me’ he murmurs – louder, I want to yell - but the huggers are deaf as well as mute and stupid. I distract myself by sharpening my poison arrows. Wait! There’s someone else in on this. Sitting at the table closest to them, thigh high suede boots, eyes like big green saucers and wearing a belt masquerading as skirt is the other woman. Aphrodite. Is she waiting her turn at a hug with Adonis. She seems very patient. I’ve now moved through and out of embarrassment and sit firmly in mindless rage. Three and three quarter minutes. I position arrow number 1. Ah, movement! They prize themselves apart and I breath a sigh of relief. It’s a false alarm though because they separate, fractionally, faces three inches apart, and gaze into each others eyes. Endlessly they check each other’s iridology, analyse the crusty sleep in each other’s eyes, look for nits nestling in their erotic eyebrows. Buggered if I know what the wilfully unaware do! Puss in boots, sorry, Aphrodite, lingers on the side. She’s not even fidgeting. A few nervous coughs ensue, chairs get shuffled, people snigger – thank god I’m not the only murderer - raised eyebrows, more coughs. I want to throw a bucket of cold water over them! Finally, after a marathon 4 minutes, they give each other a last adoring look. Adonis turns to she of the noble tolerance and nods. Persephone sits back down at the table, picks up her bulging walnut burger, and poises her perfect teeth. Let’s see you eat that with dignity I mutter under my breath. Aphrodite wraps her arm around Adonis’ waist and they disappear out into the street. Only in Mullumbimby!

 

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Carla

All it took was the sound of her name

embodied in the other

or the arrival of August

for the memory to return

and melancholy crept back slowly

into the house of her belonging

From time to time she saw her

just for an instant

in the busy mall

the old growth forest

even in Milan

but not often, and sometimes not for years

Or did she imagine she saw her

it was hard to say

for the presence of energy

like the presence of the divine

is the ineffable mystery

beyond ones measure to recall

As the years multiplied

and they became thirty

Cat remembered she too was thirty

when the infant came

but all that was left was frozen

grandmother, mother, child

A holy trinity of profound grief

that tragic, guttural, primal wail

discreet hurried nurses

shocked silence

stillness

a painful endurance

What stays is what remains

long limbs

translucent skin

fine features

indelibly pressed into the spaces

between the spaces of her mind

Where are you now little soul

who whispers to you in the night

and fills your cup with hope

does your heart hunger

for the promise of a peaceful world

when will you come again?

CARLA BURCHALL

27 August 1984

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The cultured cushion

After my volunteer stint in Arnhem Land, I came home with several metres of handmade lino cut and screen-printed cotton produced by the wonderful indigenous women of Maningrida. What was I to do with it? The selfish part of me wanted to adorn my home with its beauty. Hang it on the wall, drape it over my bed, make a dress or skirt. After all, I worked like an ox in a timber yard for its favour, survived stifling humidity and fell victim to great gaps of mental acuity (see fruit loop brain!), and suffered the deprivation of a decent coffee for 2 weeks! I deserved it! The generous part of me, on the other hand, began contemplating my accumulation of ‘stuff’. I have heaps of it. Stuff in the closet, stuff in the storage shed, stuff on the floor, a more than healthy dose of personal stuff, and generally, stuff from here to eternity. Cushions it was then!

I’m pretty sure the plump and colourful result of my labour would make the women happy. They’re unique and original. If you run your fingertips over the fabric, you can feel the rawness of paint, imagine the women at work. They come complete with imperfections from the hand printing process, with piping in a compatible or contrasting hue, have twin ties to fasten them on the back, and are filled with the softest, bounciest, and most eco-friendly cushion inserts ever, and made from recycled water bottles.

I’m offering them for sale at $50 a pop.

Call me

0431 600 138

 

 

 

 

 

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What do you do?

'Hi, I’m X, and I’m a senior lecturer at Southern Cross Uni. What do you do?’ This enquiry comes with distracted, feigned interest, a flick of her long dark superior hair and a smugness that makes me want to puke. I fucking hate this question. I try to be magnanimous, but on less charitable days my mind leans toward the cynical. ‘What do you really want to know? What I do or how I earn my money?’ I don’t go there! Regardless, my reaction to this prescriptive, potentially socially isolating and dead-end question is probably written all over my face. I feel it instantly. The protective little hairs on the back of my neck rush toward the horizontal as my emotional landscape freezes. ‘I do lots of things" I blurt. ‘Have my finger in lots of pies’. ’ The Bard says it better than I ever could!

But really, how do I answer that question? And what question would I prefer? I ‘do’ lots of things. Sometimes I lie on my bed for hours reading. This is luxurious to the point of guilty discomfort. The only way to silence the judge that criticises my down time is to just read! I sew, curse, and unpick, and sew, curse and unpick again. A crowd of cushions I’ve been making from the fabric I was given in Arnhem land has begun to colonise my workroom. One morning a week, I head to my beloved Playback Theatre. Each week we rehearse and prepare for upcoming gigs by playing silly warm-up games for an hour, and then telling our stories. After 16 years I’m still astonished by the healing power of shared personal story, and the captive, deep-listening ensemble of actors who play them back. On Friday morning I trampse down to the farmers market to buy fruit and veg for my hospice client, and head back up to the hills to be with her. Every now and then I work as a facilitator on rite of passage camps for teenagers transitioning to adulthood. These are 5-day bush retreats and involve lots of preparation, weeks of it. Occasionally I’ll spend hours writing a blog. I’m a laborious thinker! Two or three times a week, I drive down to Brunswick Heads on a whim just to walk out onto the breakwall to feel the swell of the ocean in my bones. I cook, pick citrus, covet the neighbour’s passionfruit, sit in cafes and talk to strangers, listen to birdsong, marvel at the paragliders who sprinkle the sky outside my window, support and exasperate my friends and family, play my uke, walk the dog, and reflect on the myriad of emotions I feel during the day. Envy, desire, blame, grief, confusion. Oh yeah, I'm never short of strong feeling! I attend a weekly Buddhist study group, committee meetings, and volunteer at numerous political and community-building events. It's a long coooeee from my past life as a legal/parliamentary secretary in Melbourne, far more connecting and fulfilling, and paradoxically, virtually impossible to articulate to those with a more conventional working life.

So, next time somebody asks me that oh-so-bloody-boring question I’m going to plagiarise a response I heard at the writers’ fest. ‘I work for Arnotts in Food Technology and am currently developing a product that stops the marshmallow on an Iced Vovo from sagging’!!

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Cancer: fear, care and reflection

This photo was extracted from Google Images. It’s a fungating breast tumor, the result of breast cancer left untreated. It’s identical to the growth on the breast of a hospice client I’m caring for, as big as a dinner plate, ugly, and very unpleasant on the nose. I’ve chosen to show you this image because it’s not something you’d ordinarily see. My daughter was horrified when I showed her, but it had the effect of promoting conversation. One of my interests is to demystify the often taboo subject of death. This is a provocative way of doing it. No apologies.

For nearly 15 years I’ve worked as a volunteer hospice carer with Byron Hospice a service that supports people with a terminal illness who choose to die at home. Each week, before I get out of the car at the home of my current client, I say a little prayer to help ground and centre myself and to seek guidance, put on my invisible hat of compassion and empathy, and go and sit. I’m not there to offer advice. I’m there to listen, hold a hand.  When you speak, you’re often repeating what you already know, but when you listen, you may learn something new.

My client is my age. She’s single, has no family, and has been a very active community-minded advocate for healthy families. She’s scared and vulnerable and doesn’t want to die. Who does?

My clients are my greatest teachers. They teach me about death, but more particularly, they teach me how to live well. Am I doing enough to improve the lives of disadvantaged, marginalized and lonely people? Am I using the skills I was born with for the betterment of humans, our precious planet? Have I forgiven myself my indiscretions? Is there any unfinished business I need to attend to? Have I examined my regrets? Am I ticking items off my bucket list? Do I want to die with fear and confusion, or with dignity and grace? I know the answer to that last question. What about you?

‘The only thing that death teaches us is that it is urgent to love’ Eric Emmanuel Schmit

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Two weeks on the edge

Fellow Scorpio, novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote "I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over … you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the centre". Having just spent two weeks in remote Maningrida, an Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land, 500 km east of Darwin, I agree. Maningrida’s as far from mainstream Australia as you can get, culturally shocking, and as insightful and stimulating as a trip to India for the first time.

Before I left I was concerned with two things. How my sensitivities would cope with my perceived notion of domestic violence, and whether, as a single woman, I could transition to life there. On those two counts, my concerns proved unjustified.

I worked as a volunteer in the Bawinanga Women’s Centre, a social enterprise providing empowerment and employment for the local indigenous women. Whilst ‘work’ as we know and understand it generally means 5 days slog to enjoy 2 days rest, the opposite seems to be true for our first nations people. Despite earning a wage for hours worked, the women often didn’t show up. Sorry business – the cultural practices and protocols surrounding death which can last up to a week, ceremony, gone fishing, gone walkabout for pandanus gathering, and other long established customs inform their day-to-day and keep cultural tradition alive and well in the community. How real!

The women are sewers, textile print-makers (lino-cuts and screenprints), artists, cleaners, op-shop attendants and much more. To hear them speak ‘language’ in the Centre I was reminded of my own ignorance. An ancient lineage it is and it made me reflect on what values and beliefs I hold dear and how often they direct my life. Notwithstanding a common indigenous view that white people are ‘tissues’ – white person arrives, white person leaves, another one takes their place – I felt their reserved welcome of me, and to make the occasional eye contact, was humbling. I was fortunate to work alongside them, teach them a few sewing techniques, and learn a whole lot more from them. Here’s some of their lovely work.

Dilly bag designs, lino-cuts

Helping with screen-printing. A stunning bamboo design

More screen-printed designs

All these designs, and hundreds more can be viewed, and bought at wwwbabbarradesigns.com.au

A parallel universe it might be, but the alternative reality was at such odds to my own that the cultural difference I experienced left me feeling emotionally drained and disturbed. As far as most of the balandas (white people) there are concerned, the Government ‘Intervention’ is a failure. Housing’s an issue, but mainly for the balandas. There’s never enough. The housing built to accommodate the indigenous people on the other hand, from the outside at least, seemed neither wanted nor needed. While I was told its frowned upon by authorities, the locals look far more comfortable sitting on the dusty red earth around the ubiquitous fire, burning day and night, in the front yard. The constant smell of smoke in town made it hard to breath. The supermarkets bulge with soft drinks, sweet biscuits, potato chips, long life milk products and 2-minute noodles. Sugar is devoured with a kind of manic obsession and the packaging dropped where it lands. ‘White man’s products! White man’s problem’! The town is one depressed looking garbage dump. The mangy, emaciated, scabby dogs in their hundreds satiate their rabid hunger by foraging through the balandas bins, knocked over by one large roaming resident pig who also feasts on dog and human faeces. "Watch that you don’t hit the dogs on the street" I’m warned, ‘Otherwise you’ll pay". Why the dogs appear to command the reverence of a holy cow I never found out. The effects of smoking and sugar consumption pose the two most serious health risks in the community, according to my friend who’s employed by the health service. About 10 percent of the school age children in town turn up to school. And why would they? They’re being asked to learn a curriculum in a language foreign to them! Once the young men are initiated at around 12, there seems no good reason for them to return to school. The school counsellor I spoke to one evening was at a complete loss to know how to engage them. ‘There’s no good male role models in town’ she lamented.

One of the most shocking of all sights I encountered though was ‘death alley’ (my description). This is a stretch of coastline some 500 metres long at the edge of town where the locals dump the clothes and personal effects of their dead. Custom suggests that the incoming tide will 5 times wash the effects clean of any undesirable spirit energy, and then, in an ideal world, it would be transferred to the tip. This doesn’t happen of course, and the result is a coastline littered with rotting and rusty rubbish, including car batteries, prams, fridges, lengths of iron, mattresses, bed-frames. etc.

I recommend the edge. It's a fascinating place, full of wonder and knowledge.

Thanks women of Maningrida.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Resilience

Carelessness

wallet stolen

Mindlessness

new machine damaged

Death

Aunty critically ill

 

Visitors by three

hungry ghosts

come to shatter the illusion

beware the arrogance

of a closed mind

they seem to want to say

 

The heart will not be broken

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Ode to the ANZACs

 

Brothers and uncles, grandparents and gads

Babes to their mamas, and lovers and dads

With trust and honor they served our shore

Naivety and courage their distinguishing lore

 

When the fighting was done and they all returned home

The welcome was short, yet the life-time long

For the horrors of combat are enclosed in the mind

And the memories live on, the triggers grind

 

‘It’s bullshit’ he’d say with loaded expression

downing a claret to anaesthetize his depression

‘The glorification of war is demonstrably mad’

he reminded us yearly, which just made me sad

 

I was fine all morning till the bugle was played

At the market where all the fresh fruit is displayed

The diggers were two in their medals and stripes

And the tears flowed freely, for suffering, for hype

 

 

Lest we forget

 

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A seamstress' Rite of Passage

I sew, therefore I am! Said nobody ever. The functionality of my sewing machines is what I love, although I think I’d still prefer a motorbike. At least you can go places. 

Lately I’ve been sewing again. After a long spell. Because I couldn’t get a job. I didn’t want any of them, but that’s irrelevant. Here’s what I’ve been making. They're made from old woolen blankets.

And they're for sale!

In the early years I’d take up the hems on my dresses to within a millimetre of my arse, whilst fiercely guarding the bedroom door lest mum discover my shameless pursuits. As much as possible I endured, but avoided her silent, grievous look. This was the late 60s and besides, I was told I had good legs. Despite having knock-knees, pidgeon toes and wearing orthopaedic shoes as a child! In the 70s I made most of my work clothes, fancy three piece pin-stripe suits, lace and linen ensembles, backless satin evening dresses. The latter I christened one night on the way home from the Hofbrauhaus in the Dandenongs by throwing up all over it, only hours after finishing it. Classy! In Alexandria, in Egypt in the early 80s I meticulously hand sewed a red gathered skirt to distract myself from shitting water a hundred times a day whilst nursing myself through an acute bout of amoebic dysentry. A few years later, when Phil and I lost our first child, Carla, at birth, I made dozens of tiny white night-dresses for SIDS babies. Carla’s little nightie that I found recently, after a very long time, made me sad. I made our later kids’ clothes, dinosaur and cat suits, but generally I just draped them like rubber mannequins in whatever happened to be my textile fetish at the time. There’s been wedding dresses, bronze chiffon ones, and black emo ones, and period costume for stage and film including an impressive (impressively large) ostrich-skin codpiece. As wardrobe mistress for one of Juliet Lamont’s first documentary short films, The Players, I relished the opportunity to dress two prostitutes. Corsets and stilettos. Now we're talking! 

Mostly though, I’ve undermined my inner needleworker. A combo of mediocre self-esteem, combined with a general belief that every woman sewed, didn’t they, like learning to set the table during home economics at school, or having to check in at the clinic for a Pap smear every so often. You just didn’t talk about it, did you? Well, you mightn’t! 

Anyhow, after a long 40+ year initiation, I’ve grown up, and bought two industrial machines. I’ve grown up to the extent that I’ve even put a dollar value on my capacity to thread a needle (does this needle actually HAVE a fucking hole, and if so, WHERE?) from the right direction. I’m seriously expensive (but I trade ... seeds, vegetables, overseas trips), and I’m worth it!

 

Here's my new housemates.

This is Bess. She’s named in honor of my maternal grandma who taught me to sew with patience and skill, and the heady smell of Craven A and burnt white toast. Thanks for the life-long nicotine habit Grandma! Bess is the older of the two machines, and when I look at her, she inspires a direct memory link to my old 70s stamping ground, Northcote. All grey, sinister, resilient and dependable. She’s my straight stitcher, and she rocks!

And here's Sissy. Color, sass and subversion are her hallmarks and she represents my paternal nana. She's everything Italian and the woman I credit with my passion for international textiles and cultural difference. Home was Villa Bereguardo, in Diamond Creek, and now that I think of it, her rolling hills, lemon-scented gums and deep valleys symbolize my own personal rite of passage, from young girl to young woman. My humming overlocker.

I think I'm going to like my new job. It’s practical and social. And sexy! I get to put my arms around strangers waists. And between their legs. This is as good as it gets.

Open for Business

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