POETICAL & POLITICAL & sometimes PUPPETS
Poetry rushed out of me when I was 16 years and lodging in a school-friend’s house. It was quiet – Bruce and his mum led an orderly, suburban life in Melbourne, and it was what I needed after the drama’s of my alcohol fuelled home life.
I wanted to continue to study but it wasn’t supported or really encouraged by my parents. They drank regularly in a University student’s bar because it was fun, but disparaged mature-age students, for not working and paying taxes.
When I was reading Macbeth which I adored and absorbed, my step-father said with malice: ‘what you reading Shakespeare for? Reading shit, and fanning yourself like Lady Muck!
Who do you think you are the Queen of bloody Sheba?’
Unlike many parents who make sacrifices for the education of their children ours were sure leaving school and getting a job in a factory, bringing in some money into the household and their pockets was the best thing to do.
I knew I had to leave home in order to stay at school.
It was my parents who were a bad influence, not my friends!
My first real poem was called The Waves, and rushed out of me as I lay on the neat single bed at Bruce’s house. It was an opportunity to go on a last Summer holiday. My school friend Monique had a wide network of friends.
I didn’t really know them,and being a new Australian I wasn’t sure about the class distinctions in Melbourne. I’d been at a couple of parties with Monique. One of the Brighton students I liked was Bill who downed lots of alcohol and joints, in fact they all did. He was funny and cynical sharing his working-class credentials, living with a single mother in public housing.
Someone’s parents had a block of land at Flinders on the coast. Camping was organised. Nothing to do but drink, smoke joints of bongs. These private school lot had money to spend.
This was initiation into Australian culture. At Easter Us State School year 11’s put our cash together for a big bottle of cinzano to take to Bruce’s dads family land at Taradale. We went there on the old Red rattler country train from Spencer Street station.
Bruce’s father grew up in Central Victoria at Taradale. It felt like the famous five plus the stray collie, Bill who was a little older, had left school to work at the Commonwealth Bank. He drunk his beers, smoked and watched from favoured ground.
Bill had more pals to be chummy with when we were at Wilsons Promontory. We’d been for a treck along the rocky shoreline. Some bits were challenging. I wasn’t prepared for an afternoon exertion. I feared an early death. I was dehydrated from the teenage alcoholic binge of the night before.
I turned around to head back. Nobody was with me. There was no more water except at the camp. I retraced my steps. Lesson learned. I survivedmy first Australian camping sojourn – keep lubricated with water and wear a hat. I had emigrated with my family a year earlier. I was learning how to take responsibility for my own survival.
I was alone with a pen and pad and the poem was therapeutic. It is the one natural gift that has kept me sane, insightful and finding meaning to my life.
Half a century later, I remember the scene of writing, and the exhilaration of producing a spontaneous expression, a release of The Waves, (before I read Virginia Woolf). Where did it get to? A misty memory rises of sharing my nascent skill as a wordsmith with my overnight new lover who was also a friend of a friend of the Brighton gang.
I read them to Bruce and Brett in the kitchen with The Police in the background, Roxeanne You don’t have to put on the Red Light. It was an impressed audience of three, not sure if my sister agreed. Then the cheek of him who had seduced me asked to see the paper I had written on.
Yes, of course and I handed my first poems because he wanted to show Susie, she’d look after them, put them in a box, high on top of the wardrobe for when I got famous!
Was that a compliment? Or a warning he would do the same to me?
This blog is so I leave some imprint behind for you to Enjoy and Think about!
FAIRNEY VIEWS 