Love the Kimberley

Love the Kimberley

* This is not about reading, writing, or dogs but it is about storytelling and it answers a question people have asked over the years about the photo attached to my Twitter site.

In Praise of Tours

A few years back we had a bit of a walkfest in various parts of the world. We walked the Cinque Terre in Italy after the heaviest rain in two hundred years had wiped out all the lower paths, forcing us up, up, up, into endless miles of rocky pathways through one teetering clifftop village after another.

Then we walked the Luberon in the south of France, ploughing through dense forests hiding bronze-age stone huts in their darkness and more rocky pathways that only the ancient Romans could have loved.

Eight days after arriving back in Oz I had (reluctantly) to fulfil a promise I'd made to an old friend to accompany her to the Kimberley, there to join a twelve day camping trip with a budget crowd called Kimberley Wild
And to cut to the chase, the Kimberley left everything else for dead. No contest.

Just the names can make you swoon: 

• Purnululu
• Roebuck Bay
• The Buccaneer Archipelago
• Staircase of the Moon. 

And yes, we took a tour.

Now if you have all the gear—the four-wheel drive that can negotiate the massive valley-like pot-holes of the Gibb River Road for six hundred kilometres, the camper trailer that won't get stuck or break an axle in said potholes, the capacity to change tyres and fix anything else that goes wrong, on your own in this unbelievably harsh environment—then go for it.

The road to Cape Leveque

Even so, what you won't get are the stories, the passing-on of knowledge that comes from living in this astounding place for years on end, researching its history, exploring its secrets, meeting its people, especially the indigenous caretakers, earning their trust and being privy to some of their secrets. This is what a Kimberley guide can do and the stories are what you take away. And they're never-to-be forgotten.

Our Kimberley Guide

Picture this.
A woman squats in the red dust, bony knees poking upwards like some elegant praying mantis. The Akubra on her head is curled up on both sides, dark and greasy from years of wear and weathering. It dips low on her brow, throwing her face into shadow but she peers up at us at intervals to see if we're following the story she is telling. Behind her the dissected domes of Purnululu stretch out like a miracle, matchless and breathtaking. Her aim is to explain to us how the Bungle Bungles were formed.

With one finger in the dust she traces arcs and lines signifying erosion by wind and water over twenty million years. She speaks first with excitement of the play of sandstone, clay, ants and blue-green algae, then, with sorrow, she declares that in another few million years it will all be gone, swept away by the ravages of time as she has now sketched it in the dust in curves and dashes, lines and dots.

Ria - Our Invincible Kimberley Guide

This is Ria. She's not Aboriginal, she's a London Pom, to coin her phrase, arrived in the Kimberley eight years ago after a long stretch as a tour guide in Africa. A tall and rangy woman in her forties,
Ria is strong and wiry and gorgeous.
Nothing frightens her. We're all in love with her, men and woman alike. She runs the whole tour solo. For the next twelve days she is responsible for us, eighteen disparate souls with not much in common but a desire to get inside the Kimberly and drink of its magic.

Within a day or two we've all had our photos taken in front of the bus with that Kimberley Wild sign writ large on the side. We all love the idea that we're setting out for the unknown, we city folk from Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, sharing water, sunscreen and lip balm with country folk from Dubbo, Lismore and Bermagui.

Swag-rolling sometimes needs an extra pair of hands.

We're on the road before 7 am each day, we get our own meals, wash up, roll our swags and pack the truck. No-one shirks their share of duties. If you want to sit around the campfire and get totally shickered at night, Ria will still pull you out of your swag at 5 am to help get breakfast.

When you tell people you're off on a bus tour the common response is 'Oh I'd never get Dave/Jill/Max (insert partner's name) to go on a tour', as if tours are for wimps or grannies. I may have been of this mind-set myself before I met Ria, before we put ourselves in her hands on this 2,642 kms round trip up the Gibb River Road, through the Savannah to the sea and back to Broome via Kununurra, Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing.

We'd all abandoned our feather doonas and heated bathrooms for canvas swags that we rolled out under stars like we'd never imagined stars could be. We were all made silent by the wonder of it all, struggled to describe it adequately, finally settled on 'life-changing'.
Now, I know that anyone can describe the wonders of the falls and gorges, the chasms, lakes and tunnels, hot springs and underground creeks, the splendour of El Questro and the magnitude of Lake Argyle.

Lake Argyle

....but none of these would have been half so wondrous without Ria's presence. Her knowledge seemed boundless and her sense of humour never flagged.

'Every tree's a lav-a-tree, that's the best you'll get from me,' she sang when the inevitable questions about toilets first arose. And everyone accepted this with good grace, sidling off alone into the bushes when necessary with Ria's cry of 'Watch out for the spinifex!' putting paid to any hopes of discretion.

The Storyteller

But her greatest feat was storytelling.
The road between highlights was often long and arduous with hours between stops. But oh, the stories!

On the long, long stretches of red dirt road Ria told us—among other things— of the history of the cattle industry and the famous Kidman empire, the deals done between the station owners and the Aboriginal workers, the history of the discovery of the first Argyle diamonds, the geological history and possible future of the Bungle Bungles and every other mighty gorge we climbed into. 

Bell Gorge

She brought to life the heart-stopping story of Jandamarra, a fearless Aboriginal freedom fighter of the 1800's, who attained mythical status by his efforts to challenge the status quo and get away with it. As we tramped through the darkness of Tunnel Creek she pointed out the ledges where he'd hidden and made real the details of his escape.

Ria explains Aboriginal rock art (with permission).

She told us who owns what and since when, including the history of the Durack family, the ownership saga of El Questro, how the hot springs there were formed and what happened in the floods. She covered the mysteries of the Aboriginal 'floral calendar', the protocols regarding Aboriginal rock art (she got us into places where individual travellers were denied permission to go) and was vehement about current efforts to maintain the integrity of Aboriginal culture.

Often when we set up camp several Aboriginal people would appear out of the shadows and join us for dinner, greeting Ria like a loved sister.

She never ran out of stories. Every time she began we settled back like kids on the kindergarten mat and let ourselves be immersed in her story-telling. We learned so much more than we ever could have done though books, brochures and information centres. At the end of the twelve days we were all smitten, struggling to remember it all, to take the tales home with us. As a group we didn't want to part, not from each other and certainly not from Ria. I'd love to see a Ria in every school in Australia, just to awaken in every child an awareness of the magic of this country and so make them want to head off and see it for themselves.

But maybe they're all like this, these people who spend their days and nights making The Kimberley known to the likes of us. Maybe that's the gift the Kimberley bestows of you when you commit to settle and earn your living there.
It's worth taking a tour just to find out.

~*~

The Books We Leave Behind

Today, on Twitter (no, it's not all for trolls and airheads) I was alerted to this article in The Australian, an exquisitely beautiful piece by bookseller Michelle Coxall that resonated with me and got me thinking about the books that form such a crucial part of our personal history.


Those of us who love to browse secondhand bookshops get an extra thrill from finding an inscription inside the cover - "To our dear daughter, Dorothy, on the occasion of your graduation - Dec. 1964" or better still, a fading card slipped in between the pages "Dear Bruce, I hope this helps to get you better soon",  or "Fay, in memory of the good times".

The amazing Cath Crowley captured the spirit of all this in her recent, wonderful Y.A. novel Words in Deep Blue , a romance set in a bookstore where readers leave notes, poems and letters for friends, strangers and lovers. Reviewer Emily Mead described it as ' A love letter to books, bookshops and words' which just about captures its essence perfectly.
But Michelle Coxall's evocative piece brought back an early experience of mine which a psychiatrist friend assured me is now embedded in my 'residual traumata', never to be erased.

From our country high school in northern NSW, I and 18 of my classmates won commonwealth scholarships (those were the days) and were packed off on a bus to the University of New England, there to live in residence for 4 years and learn some of the things we hadn't already learned on Greenmount Beach. However, when I came home for the first term holidays it was to find that my mother had given away all my books. 'They were just kids' books,' she said, puzzled, 'what would you still want them for?'

In her defence, she was orphaned at birth, and in all our days together I never saw her put the slightest value on any material possession of any sort. Gifts that we saved up to buy her she gave away to the first person who admired them, completely unable to understand why we might be upset.

So yes, there it is, and likely to remain so, in my residual traumata, the loss of all my childhood books to someone called 'the Ebzery kids' as I recall, so I guess they at least went to a home of some sort.

There was a collection of Enid Blytons - Enid, to whom I still attribute my undying love of books and reading - a pile of Schoolgirls' Own Library magazines, the whole set of Mallory Towers adventures, another set of books by Lorna Hill, all set in Sadlers Wells (A Dream of Sadlers Wells, Veronica at Sadlers Wells) and an early pre-school favourite, Professor Pringle's Pink Powder.

Most precious of all was a very strange hard-back book unearthed from somewhere by an elderly uncle, I think, and given to me, called In the Land of the Talking Trees. I was way too young to read it or understand it but the full page colour pictures scared the living daylights out of me every time I opened it - and we know how much fun that is when you're eight.

My dear spouse, having heard the sorry tale of my lost books more than he probably needed to, set about finding a copy of it and - at great expense to the management - succeeded. I can't tell you the emotions it brought back when I opened the parcel. I pick it up now and what comes flooding back to me is the terrible shock, the emptiness, of coming home from UNE after that first term and finding my meagre little bookshelves irretrievably empty.

I love to share my books now. Read this, I say, it's sublime. Of some books we say, my friends and I, read it and pass it on; I don't want it back. Others I all but count the days until they're returned. I will always let you know which is expected.

They're an integral part of us, our own books, as essential and as loved as anything we might possess. I'm still trying to understand that if someone has never owned anything much it might be incomprehensible to hang onto things and not set them free for someone else to enjoy. Setting free someone else's possessions is something else altogether. But I'm trying to understand that as well.

No success yet, but I'm trying.

~*~

Love Song - by Nikki Gemmell

I'd never heard of Nikki Gemmel until all the fuss about A Bride Stripped Bare blew up some years ago and then the string of manipulative tricks —well-publicised 'anonymity', clunky second person voice, 'shocking' exposition of a woman's sexual explorations—conspired to turn me off it after I'd read a few unconvincing chapters. When this one book developed into a sort of trilogy and anyone whose opinion I trusted rolled their eyes and said things like 'Oh puh-lease!' I put Nikki in the not-for-me basket. Popular, maybe with merit. Just not for me.

Then last week I pulled from the shelves of a favourite secondhand book shop a battered and stained copy of her 2001 novel Love Song. I bought it because of the accolades on the front and back covers - '...evocative, imaginative, lyrical— a joy to read.' (The Bulletin). 'A lovely, lyrical creation that has melody and melancholy aching through its sentences... bewitchingly good.' (Elle, UK) and 'A striking and memorable work...Love Song will reward a second reading with pleasure in its vigour and love for life and language.' (Australian Book Review).

Ah, there it is! The magic word - language.
And that's what drew me in. It's not an 'easy' read if you want to whiz through just for the story, because the language, the imagery and the startlingly original use of words conspire to stop you in your tracks to reread, to savour, reflect upon and read again.

There's no end of beautiful literary devices:
'...like an anemone that's softened in the tide's silky swirl...'

'...behind a first scrim of cloud there's a higher heaven and I smile at the optimism in the sky.'

And the sky that hangs 'like the water-bowed ceiling of an old house.'


But it's not all wafty lyricism. There are plenty of down-to-earthers: 'Yeah, but I belong here, mate, and you don't' and 'Oh for God's sake,' I snap, mother-old.

It was the originality of the prose that brought to life Lillie Bird's craving to bestow and to receive love. In particular, what struck me most was Gemmell's use of the hyphenated descriptor and here's a small selection from the hundreds used:

flit-panicky hands
sun-fuddled sleepiness   
full-moon-flooded night         
sea-licked 
sliddery-scrape
beam-webbed rooms
the rake-splay of bones

These and other innovative arrangements of words are what will entice me to read it again, as the ABR suggests.
This time though, I'll try and avoid stopping to reread the words and read just for the story which is gut-wrenching and drowsy-deep with emotion—part coming-of-age story, part tragedy, part mystery but always - a love song.

So, Nikky. I loved this book. I'll nag a select few friends to read it so I can discuss it with them. 

And I'll live in hope that you might soon regress to your old ways and write another just like it.

~*~

Writers-on-Saturday

Photograph by ullstein bild via Getty Images

At a dinner near the end of last year I got to talking with a group of fabulous RMIT - PWE women about a NaNoWriMo stint I'd done the year before with a group at the Abbotsford convent, convened by successful crime writer P.D. Martin.  I had done a writing course with Phillipa some years ago and even though she's a crime writer and I'm not (one Scarlet Stiletto shortlisting aside) I found her so professional, generous and supportive that I jumped at the chance to join this group.
I started a new manuscript and it was great fun - most of us managed to write about 8,000 words on each of the Sundays we met. Predictably a great deal of editing was necessary between sessions and—as Phillipa had warned us—there were often sections of the writing we'd produced where later we had no recall of ever having written it.
So years later at the dinner, after some mutual moaning about not having the time/discipline/motivation to write as much as we'd like, we decided to meet one Saturday in each month to—for want of a better plan— just "shut up and write".
We booked a room somewhere central, all chipped in to pay 6 months worth of the amazingly cheap fee they charged, and so began Writers-on-Saturday.
Three sessions in it's been very gratifying. Some of us meet for coffee first and we do break for half an hour for lunch. Otherwise it's into the room with laptops, heads down and write, 11 - 4.
It's true that most of us have no excuse for not doing this in the comfort of our own spaces or homes but it's helpful to have none of the excuses in this setting like the ones we resort to at home -

• "I might just check my email/twitter/text messages/blog."
• "I might just pop in a load of washing."
• "What's that Archie? Pleeease take you for another walk? Oh all right then, come on."
• "Surely it's time for another coffee by now."
• "I might just check Dashboard for another word for amazing."

...and so on.

The room we've booked only takes 10, tops, and though others have expressed an interest in joining, unfortunately the spaces aren't there.

But it's a lovely thing to do. We stay in touch, catch up with who's writing what, what plans there are for the next manuscript, competition entry, website or blog and the focus stays reliably on writing.

I think all of us who attend so far would recommend it as a productive thing for any writer to do - unless you're fabulous, disciplined, successful and already an inspiration to the rest of us.
Then you're on your own.

~*~

Saint Ned

My winning flash fiction piece below...
Published in 1000 Words or Less (2) 2016

Saint Ned

Gentle voice, careful not to offend.

‘I think you’ve put sugar in your tea already, Gracie love.’

Thinks? He knows, but treads warily. Careful, Ned. She’s replenished her tea with two extra spoons of sugar twice already. A new need for sweet things can sometimes be a part of it, they told him. That and what else? He walks as if on broken glass every day, carefully, still taken by surprise by the occasional outbursts.

Grace looks at him, eyes bright, bird-like, but empty. There’s a vague smile, touched with challenge. She reaches again for the sugar bowl but he takes her hand, covering it with his own, all age-spotted and brown.

‘We’re off to see Kate’s new baby this morning, remember? We’ll go when you’ve finished your tea.’

‘Are we going to see a baby?’

‘Yes, love, Kate’s baby. Our daughter, Kate. She’s called the baby Grace, after you, remember?’

‘I want to have my tea.’

‘I know, Gracie love. Have your tea and then we’ll go see the new baby.’

‘Who’s got the baby?’

‘Kate has, remember? Our daughter Kate.’

She reaches again for the sugar bowl and stabs into it with her teaspoon.

‘No, you’ve put sugar in...’

But he’s said the no word. She snatches her cup away from his reach, spilling it onto her lap, then shoves her chair back and raises an arm in fury, as if to strike. Then tears spring to her eyes.  She looks first at the wet patch spreading across her dress, then stares at Ned, puzzled.

‘Sit down, love, finish your tea. There we go,’ and he refills her cup.

Grace sits but can’t take her eyes off her dress where the tea stain spreads.

There’s a silence spreading too, just like the stain.

Ned slumps forward and puts his head in his hands. Behind his closed and weary eyes, he sees the future stretching ahead, a long brown corridor along which he must plod, endlessly kind, infinitely patient. It’s not her fault.  He knows that, Saint Ned.

~*~

Olga Lorenzo - The Rooms in My Mother's House

What to say when a book leaves you silent? Profoundly, deep-in-thought, don't-speak-to-me silent.
Last semester I had the privilege of having Olga Lorenzo as my fiction teacher in the Professional Writing & Editing course at RMIT. I wasn't the only one in the class who didn't want it to end, wanted to stay on and do the whole thing over again. Like Oliver, I wanted more.

I had read Olga's latest book, The Light on the Water, and was affected by the portrayal of the protagonist's alienation, from some of those who should have loved and supported her in her time of crisis. So I badly wanted to read Olga's first novel The Rooms in My Mother's House, published in 1996. I'd previously made cursory searches on various online sources to no avail but one day, just before Christmas, as I browsed the shelves of one of my best secondhand bookshops, there it was, the pages browning at the edges but otherwise pristine and still with the Penguin's 20-year-old bookmark in the front. Where has it been all the years?

You can read in any reference that the story charts the lives of three generations of women—the Santiagos: Dolores, Consuelo and Ana—and their family's flight from Cuba as the revolution unfolds.

This does nothing to prepare you for being immersed in the relentless anguish of their lives nor for understanding the elements of love that prevail against seemingly insurmountable odds.


'But what was it like?' a reader friend persisted as I struggled to describe it.
'Okay,' I said. 'It was stunning - powerful, shocking, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, tender, unfathomable, enlightening.'
I might need to read it again. There was shame, longing, injustice, loss, nostalgia, endurance, bitterness and love. Despite all that, love.
When I first (with a lot of help) created this website I had a section for Swooners - snippets of writing that stopped me in my tracks to read the words over and over again. I didn't keep it up for very long. My criteria were perhaps too stringent. But there were plenty off passages in this books that made me stop and mark the pages.

"...and you grip the chipped platter with the fading roses, the little china cup. They are testimonials to the past wealth of the family, to its substance, or merely to the fact that it was - there was a past, and here is the link, we've held on to this, this small piece of evidence.
The Santiagos had nothing like this."
How much does this say!

And later -
"Consuelo's grandfather worked slowly, in rhythm with the droning world, swing bend toss, slashing alone at the solid walls of humming cane, the stalks flying up, slapping his face and him slapping them back down, killing them for good."

Occasionally, a stark statement that stopped this reader in her tracks, making me stare off into the distance, wondering...
"It is an evil myth that the bad things that happen in your childhood strengthen you. They never do."

Startling images abound -
"Consuelo hummed bits of songs. She couldn't remember the words. She couldn't finish anything, couldn't connect. Words images songs memories and things she would have to do tomorrow passed through her mind like meteorites.." and ... pawpaws hanging off trees like hungry puppies.

The final pages I could quote in their entirety, knowing you too will swoon, but I won't because after all, they are the final pages.
I've spent much of this hot, hot day combing the internet for information about Cuba, the revolution, this book and what Olga is going to do next. I sat up very straight and very suddenly when I read that she is working on another novel - an ambitious novel - set in Cuba during the revolution.

While we're waiting for that, I hope you search for and find a copy of The Rooms in My Mother's House - because you're not getting mine.

~*~

Memories of Flowers

My Blueberry Ash tree is flowering again for only the second time in about 15 years. It's well worth the wait. They seem to appear suddenly and I greet the flowers with a gasp of joy when I first notice them.

En masse they appear like a pale pink cloud against the sky. Up close their detail is miraculous, each individual flower a tiny frilly skirt, a dancer's dress, a fairy costume.

That's what I decided when I was about 5 anyway, and first discovered such a tree on Mrs Brown's hill.

We lived out in the country with money and transport both in short supply but I had, since the age of about 5, a best friend, Denise, and together, even at that age, we were free to roam and explore as we wished. No-one seemed to worry much as long as we showed up before dark. So I think I was with Denise when the blueberry ash tree first showed itself.

Mrs Brown's hill was also home to the sweet-scented pittosperum,

Pittosporum

wild raspberries and finger limes that made us
screw up our faces and shriek at their sourness when we peeled off the bumpy green skin and sucked out the little spherical beads of juice. (Denise and I and 6 other friends from school hiked in northern Italy together a few years back, so those country friendships endured.)

But is there anything like flowers to bring back memories? Smells, yes, but the sight of flowers remembered from long ago is something else again.

My mother wasn't much of a gardener though she kept cut flowers in vases in the house at all times, as my sister and I still do. (She thought nothing of lopping off a few branches of the blossoming Anzac peach tree to fill a vase in the kitchen.) My Dad was the gardener, cultivating huge terraces of multi-coloured dahlias, a bright blue hydrangea hedge, climbing pink cottage roses and an enormous featured white azalea bush in the middle of the front lawn.

Mrs Brown, who owned the hill and the farm down on the flats, was the only person I knew who cultivated annuals in neat borders and artistic clumps. Frequently she invited me out into her garden to pick posies of purple bachelors buttons, violas and pansies to take home.

I'm transported when any of these things bloom for me now. Even the pittosporum, which I was told should be chopped out post haste, brings pleasure with its heady perfume and its flower heads full of bees.

Is it any wonder then that I spend much of my time in the garden, exulting over the offerings there, ignoring the broken, dirty fingernails and the detritus in my gumboots? It's all worth it when something like the blueberry ash decides to bloom, bringing with it memories of 2 bare-foooted five-year olds loose on Mrs Brown's hill.

~*~