Susan Green

When you’re a very small child – say three or four – you can at last walk and talk and take part in the world, but you don’t have perspective. Everything is new. Almost anything is possible or at least plausible. Shiny and bright or dark and terrifying, it is all significant. Like most people, I have only a few memories from that time, but there are a some vivid images, like the thick oozing golden-ness of a boiled egg, or motes of dust floating in the air above my cot. And Mother Holle with her enormous teeth and the trail of white pebbles Hansel dropped behind him as his parents led him and Gretel deep into the woods. They’re fairy story people, I know, but stories can feel the same as experiences, and in my early childhood I was soaked in stories.

There are a few reasons for that. Following nearly fatal pneumonia when I was six weeks old, I’d had what was called in those days ‘a weak chest’; I was often sick in bed for weeks at a time. I was lucky – my father was an artist who worked from home  – and there was the time for stories and lots and lots of books. Art books, history books, books on design and architecture and antiques, picture story books ranging from Orlando the Marmalade Cat and Rupert the Bear to bible stories and an illustrated version of The Iliad and the Odyssey. And of course, fairy tales. You might think that surrounded by all these books and so often marooned in bed, I’d have learned to read early, but no. Perhaps, since I was always being read to, I simply didn’t bother. Besides, I looked at the pictures; I improvised.
At one stage I was addicted to my father’s collection of a magazine called Discovering Art. I especially keen on the Renaissance, and fired my imagination with mythology and martyrdom. Botticelli’s Venus in her shell was a mermaid princess transformed into a human.

And there was a particular St Sebastian, looking rather complacent as, stuck full of arrows, he lolled at the stake. He was a handsome prince enduring a test of valour to win the hand of a princess.

Prince, princess – can you tell that fairy stories were my favourites? It was the early 1960’s, and colour printing had at last come of age, so there were some magnificent volumes – full-colour, large-format – which were birthday presents from indulgent childless friends. One in particular, The Enchanted Princess, enchanted me.

I wanted to be one, when I grew up.

Why not? I had no delusions of grandeur. At four and five, I didn’t know much, but it didn’t take the Almanach de Gotha for me to figure out that my parents were not royalty. My mother worked at the local high school, my father wore a flat woollen cap and rode a pushbike, our house was ramshackle and most of my clothes were hand-me-downs. But, princess-wise, all of this was no barrier. Goose-girls and shepherdesses, village maidens at the well or at their spinning-wheels, even the unloved drudge who slept in the cinders – all of these could have greatness thrust upon them.

In my mind the fact that I was small and often dirty, rather fat, and with a constantly runny nose scarcely weighed against me, though my hair colour was a slight problem. Why were there so few black-haired princesses?

I stayed in that world of magical possibilities for a long time. It was a combination of shyness, introversion and general immaturity. Perhaps there was some developmental delay – I took forever to learn to read and spent endless afternoons of torture with the Infant Mistress in Remedial Class.

And when I sensed I was being tipped out of that world – a world I never really wanted to leave – I hung on as long as I could. And how better to stay there than to become a writer?

Actually, first I wanted to become an illustrator and a writer. My plan, when I grew up, was to write and illustrate my own children’s books. As part of my Higher School Certificate art folio, I drew a set of illustrations for Beauty and the Beast. I had always loved the story, but when I was in my early teens my father took me to a Jean Cocteau film at an art-house cinema. It was La Belle et le Bete, a crackly black and white print with sub-title and wonky special effects, but I found it magical and unforgettably lovely.

The transformation scene, where Beauty cradles the furry-faced monster in her arms and he turns into Jean Marais, had me in tears. I tried the best I could to reproduce that scene. My style was a bit Aubrey Beardsley, a bit Art Nouveau. Perhaps I was misty-eyed by the time I lettered “Dear Beast, Do Not Die” under my detailed pen drawing. I made a mistake. Misty eyes turned to a flood of tears but happily my father showed me how to scratch off the offending letter with a razor blade and then smooth the wounded paper with an industrial diamond. I fancied up the other letters with leaves and tendrils and I’m the only one who knows Beauty is really saying, as if she’s got a blocked nose,  “Dear Beast, Do Dot Die.”

Sometimes it’s hard to find the right book for your mood. This week I’ve tried a couple of crime thrillers and put them down after 30 or so pages. Next I started a literary novel translated from the Swedish and lasted five pages and a peek at the end. Sometimes – actually more often than not – if I’m not doing too well with a book, I read the ending and if I like that, I sort of skip backwards a bit. If I still like what I’m reading, I start again. This wasn’t the case with the dreary Swedish number. So I went to the bookshop and the library and I’m pleased to say I’ve read two books this week, one new and one old.

The new release is Song for a Scarlet Runner by Julie Hunt. It was a gripping tale and I read it almost in the one go. One reason is that Julie Hunt’s world building is earthed and meticulous. I love maps in books – and I did sort of wish this book had one – but perhaps it wasn’t needed, for Peat’s journeying from the Overhang through all the different landscapes – the Escarpment, the farmlands, the marshes, the city of Rim, and the strange dream land by the sea where the Stiltman lived –  were all so real that you could trudge along with her.  Adding to the groundedness – and I suppose the roundedness as well! –  was Julie’s insistence on attending to the physical aspects of the journey. Peat gets hungry, cold, and tired; she needs clothes and bedding and a shelter over her head; when her leg is broken and becomes infected, she needs healing from Marsh Auntie Edie’s herbs. There are lots of meals in this book; some sound yummy, but when she’s desperate, Peat eats raw fish and I could almost feel the slippery texture.

The other reason was – of course – the characters. The heroine, Peat, is plucky, smart and sensible ; the Marsh Aunties are a fantastic crew who reminded me, just a little, of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Which and Mrs Who from A Wrinkle in Time; and then there’s the wonderful Stiltboy.  I loved the way he spoke.
“Who are you?” I asked, although I thought I already knew.                                           “Siltboy,” he answered. “I am his.”                                                                                                 “Whose?”                                                                                                                                               “Siltman’s. I am the Siltman’s boy.”                                                                                                   “You are now, but you weren’t always.”                                                                                            “Truth,” he said. “Siltboy was the son of Pike. He knows the battle ways.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a slingshot. “How many years have you got?” he asked.             I supposed he meant how old was I. “Nine.”                                                                                    “I’ve got nine hundred.”                                                                                                                         “Nine hundred! But you’re not even grown up!”                                                                             Siltboy drew himself up to his full height, which brought him just under my chin. “Siltboy is grown,” he said. “He is strong in the legions and  brave in the heart. In the old days he would have been a giant.”

Siltboy, like Peat, was stolen by the Siltman and enslaved as part of a supernatural bargain made by someone else. In Siltboy’s case, it was his father, Pike. I was so glad that he had a happy ending!

And I was especially charmed by the sleek, who would bite you as soon as look at you, but turned out to be a devoted and trustworthy guide.
And the cover is terrific, too. What a gorgeous sleek! Just look at its naughty little eyes. It’s rather like a squirrel, I think. On our Canadian travels we saw lots and lots of squirrels. I guess they’re common as rats over there, but it took a while for us to stop squealing with delight when we saw them. They had a way of running along like mad and then stopping still quite suddenly and freezing. “You can’t see me if I don’t move!”; was that what they were thinking?

I hope this is just the first story about Peat.

The library book was The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett. I read it pretty much in one go, as well. It’s a novel for children with so much to offer adults as well; beautiful, lyrical writing and a moving story about courage and kindness. The descriptions of Monsieur Lieutenant trying to look after his soldiers in the muddy trenches of World War I France had me wiping away tears and remembering my grandfather who was gassed at Passchendale.

Children’s novels were absolutely right for my mood this week!

I’m just back from a family holiday in Canada. We were there for most of May – catching up with old friends and covering a lot of ground. We spent time in Vancouver, in Guelph (which is about an hour from Toronto), in Montreal and in Quebec City. We saw many wonders on and off the tourist trails.

In the Vancouver aquarium, a Beluga whale, white and gleaming as – well, I should say marble because it sounds both more natural and more poetic, but actually it looked almost artificial, like brand-new plastic.

The Niagara Falls, which even amongst all the tourist tat is utterly magnificent. I could have spent hours just looking at the water as it flowed over the edge, down down, down to the river below where flocks of gulls wheeled and turned endlessly in the mist and spray and ‘The Maid of the Mist’, the tourist craft, chugged up as close as it would with its passengers, in blue hooded plastic ponchos, looking like a boatload of Smurfs.

On a long drive from Guelph to a little town called Blythe, we ran over a skunk and now I know about stink.

We also saw Amish people going about their daily lives, dressed in sober black, with the men in hats and the women in white bonnets, driving buggies, plowing and spreading manure with draught horses, hoeing in the vegetable patch, looking after children in the yard. Perhaps the most enchanting sight was a group of four or five little girls wearing coloured bonnets – primrose yellow and pink – playing Ring 0’Rosie in their schoolyard.

When we got to Vancouver on the 1st of May, the whole place was going wild with bloom. Tulips, magnolias, rhododendrons, not to mention a whole lot of humbler flowers I didn’t recognise.

Oh, except for dandelions. I had to take a photograph of them because they’re so much BIGGER than ours are.

Our friend Pat in Guelph kept telling us that her garden would be looking so much better in a few weeks time, but for me it was stunning. The northern spring! A tree that was almost bare except for a faint green fuzz had leaves unfold almost as we watched. Hosta leaves which poked out of the bare earth like pencils unfurled dramatically. Everywhere were birds yodelling their heads off, bumblebees blundering in and out of pollen, animals –  squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and even a groundhog – on the go. It was marvellous.

My friend David has a cabin in the woods in the Appalachian Mountains in Quebec near the border with Vermont. Rambling around on his property I saw lots of deciduous trees (including maples, of course) showing that new, fresh, bright green. But one day I walked along the road away from the cabin, and on one side was a forest of pine and spruce. It was very quiet and still. With quite a jolt, I realised that this is the landscape of fairy tale. Deep, dark, mysterious and just a little bit scary. At the forest’s edge I saw three jewel-like berries on a spray, then a red-shouldered bird flew above me into the woods, singing. I held my breath, half hoping, half fearing, that something would happen… And surprised that a landscape so very much not mine would have such an effect on me.

The last time I was in Canada was 1991, and I kept copious travel diaries. My god, I worked hard! Every night, page after page, labouring not to lose a single significant sight or sound, almost obsessed with capturing experience. So much so, that I think sometimes I wasn’t able to just be where I was; there was always some part of my mind quibbling about which adjective I’d use later, storing up imagery and metaphors, trying to wrestle some kind of meaning out of it all.

This time, I took my camera and even then at times chose not to get it out of its case. I didn’t write a thing except postcards. I tried to be in the now of travel and it was just wonderful. And if what I write doesn’t have the immediacy of my last campaign, well…too bad. This time, I experienced the experience.

Last week, I read three sad books in a row. Why? Oh, I don’t know. They were there on the shelf and I didn’t realise that I was diving into a sea of tragedy and loss. They were all  non-fiction, too, which made my sadness even sadder. In future I will try for a bit more balance!

First I read Oranges and Sunshine by Margaret Humphreys. Child migrants to Australia; abused, exploited, unloved, lied to and then ignored by successive governments in Britain and here in Australia. Teary stuff.

Then Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth. Some of the East Ender stories are funny and sweet, but poor Mary is the character who stuck in my mind. A 14-year-old Irish runaway, raped by her mother’s boyfriend, then “befriended” by a ponce (who she loves, poor little thing, as he’s the only man who’s shown her any tenderness). Practically imprisoned, she’s forced to work as a prostitute, then falls pregnant and runs away because she’s seen for herself what a backyard abortion is like… She encounters the author, and it seems like there might be a happy ending, but her child is taken from her for adoption to a good Catholic family. That’s the beginning of the end for Mary, who ends up in jail after kidnapping a baby. More tears.And I was definitely feeling down after finishing Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. It’s the story of the author’s friendship with Lucy Grealy. Grealy was a talented poet who suffered cancer of the jaw as a child and into adulthood continued to need operation after operation to try to re-make her poor damaged face. She could be insecure, depressed, needy and addictive but for Patchett (and it seems a crowd of other friends) Grealy’s charm and spark and brilliance seemed to make up for all that. It ended badly – of course – because all the love and reassurance in the world couldn’t put poor Lucy together again.

After three sad books, I was in need of solace. I went to a cafe and ate cake – date, chocolate and almond meringue cake with cream – and finished my library book.

It was Cicada Summer by Kate Constable from the library. What a charmer of a book it is. Though it’s not all sweetness and light, for the heroine Eloise has become mute after the death of her mother. Withdrawn and anxious, she’s virtually marooned with her reclusive grandmother in a country town. But at an old house with a tangled garden, she meets a girl from another time and together they paint a mural in the summerhouse. I loved the way Kate Constable has captured the excitement of creativity.

 Colour exploded from her brush: with every touch, the picture flowered and swarmed into being. From Eloise’s imagination, it zinged through her hand and her brush and onto the wall, becoming something real. This morning it had been just an idea trapped inside Eloise’s head: now it was free, something new and fresh and anyone could see it. Making something: it was the best feeling in the world.

The ending is clever and satisfying, and it reminded me of my much-loved childhood favourite Tom’s Midnight Garden by Phillipa Pearce.

Cake and a children’s book…just lovely!

Op Shops are great for books. There must be people who are forever refreshing their shelves because you can find not just new and new-ish novels but classics that you’d think would just keep their own permanent spot like perennial plants in the garden. Recently, on the book shelf in the Vinnies Op Shop on Phillip Island, I found a few classics I didn’t have – Madame Bovary, The Trial, The Mill on the Floss. There were also some Margaret Drabble novels. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Margaret Drabble book, so at $2 a pop I took a punt and bought one. It’s called The Radiant Way, and when I got back to the holiday house and took a look at my haul (which also included some ceramic coasters with Germanic Gothic-y lettering and illustrations, a very nice skirt and a cardi) I found that the book had been signed. There it was – Margaret Drabble –  in blue biro on the now-yellowing title page. A very bold signature, with large initials and loops. What would a graphologist say? Well, I have to say this signed copy there in the Phillip Island Vinnies gave me a bit of a thrill – I don’t really know why – and I got to wondering how it had ended up where it did, twenty-five years after the publication date. And where and when it was signed. At a launch? Though this is the Penguin paperback, not the first hardcover edition. Perhaps a fan got her to autograph it at some literary event. Here in Australia? or perhaps in the UK. Or did Margaret Drabble just sit at her desk and sign a whole pile? I went back the next day and bought the other two novels in the trilogy. Unsigned.

I’ve just finished reading it. “HER POWERFUL NEW NOVEL FOR THE EIGHTIES” it says on the cover, but now reads almost as a historical novel; all the changes and losses, all the rifts in the social fabric in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain have receded into the past, and her picture of displacement and dis-ease in troubled times which would have probably seemed powerful then seem like just  background noise now.  What I enjoyed was the foreground, and apart from the three central characters – three women, Liz, Alix and Esther – and their intertwined stories, I loved the descriptions. I’ve often noticed that how-to books about writing peddle the advice that you should avoid like the plague cascades of adjectives. One word, the right one, should be sufficient. And of course eliminate the dreaded, dreadful adverb; the gold standard seems to be a kind of perfect pared-down minimalism. Perhaps it all goes back to Hemingway. Well, bugger that, I say – and obviously Margaret Drabble doesn’t go for it either.

And wonderful it was, like a fairy story, a Bohemian fairy story. The little room was illuminated by candles, by a paraffin lamp, by crackling packing-case twinges in a real fire in a real Victorian grate:its walls were painted a dark midnight blue, its floor was painted a deep red with a dark-blue and green patterned border. wooden painted chairs stood at a table covered with a white embroidered cloth and painted bowls and plates, huge cushions lay in heaps in a corner, there were two comfortable chairs covered (Alix recognised the material) with the old velveteen curtains her own other had brought down from Leeds years ago and which she’d never got around to hanging.                                             “Sit, sit,” said Nicholas, and Alix and Brian sat in the comfortable chairs, while the angels hovered, with glasses of fire-light-glinting red wine, with olives on a white plate, with nuts on a blue plate.

She gives the same lavish treatment to all sorts of settings – a cocktail party, a woman’s bedroom, a country picnic, even the disgusting decay of a squat – ...a narrow corridor, smelling of damp, ancient glue, wet plaster, chalk mice; the floorboards were soft and uneven with layers of debris and newspaper and cardboard and bits of under felt…

These wordy descriptions give me the sense of reading what I not-so-secretly think of as a “real, proper old-fashioned novel” – one that’s full and perhaps maybe too-full to the point of brimming-over with ideas and people and words and life. Generous, nothing stinted.

And speaking of generous and unstinting – though on a totally different track  – I went with friends to the Bruce Springsteen concert at Hanging Rock last weekend. He is 63 and (amazingly) played, full-bore, for more than 3 hours. I’ve never been a  devoted Bruce fan – and knew so little of his repertoire that (though only for an instant!) I mistook the lyrics “Old Tom Joad“ for “Jean Cocteau” – so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the experience. Actually, I’ve been raving most of the week. It was such a feel-good show – at the risk of sounding like an old hippie, I’ll say that you could feel the love. Waves going from the crowd and back from the stage. He smiled nearly all the time – he appeared to be having a fine time – and must have felt a little like a god, with around 15,000 people singing his own song back to him. Well, if not like a god, at least spectacularly good. A good concert is a life-enhancing thing.

So is a good play. A few years ago, I went to a performance of Bell Shakespeare’s – it was Twelfth Night – at the Capitol in Bendigo. It was not long after the fires; they set the play amongst a group of fireys in smoke-stained overalls with a huge pile of donated clothes on the stage behind them. At the end, the cast gathered at the front of the stage and sang a song – it was a version of Katrina and the Waves Walking on Sunshine – and it was there, that feeling, a current of love, of  give and take with the audience. I thought then how wonderful it must feel for the actors, to have given so many people such pleasure. I know I floated out, arm in arm with my husband and son, misty-eyed and on a high – and I don’t think I was the only one.

First, a rant. A rant that I shouldn’t be having, actually, since in the last couple of weeks of sprained-ankle-induced sloth, I have been reading all my Buddhist books and attempting to practice mindfulness. I have managed to make one biscuit seem like a four course meal. I have taken great pleasure in hanging out the clothes and washing dishes. I have been patient in phone queues. I have agreed with Sylvia Boorstein whose little book on practical Buddhism, It’s Easier Than You Think, is still, on my umpteenth reading, a joy and an inspiration.  But it’s no good. I’ve been all steamed up about the Street Art issue, and after stewing as well as steaming, I dashed off a very cross letter to the local paper. That should be the end of it. Why am I still stewing?

Perhaps I’d better explain. As part of the Castlemaine Festival, some students from the secondary college have collaborated on a piece of street art – Text Alley – in our town. Some residents took offence at one of the pieces – a black reindeer with the words “Christmas is a lie” next to it – and the next thing you thing you know, shock! horror! it’s a local scandal. Not just the Castlemaine Mail, but the Midland Express (really one and the same, but the latter is more Kyneton-based. And it’s free) and the Bendigo Advertiser began huffing and puffing. A letter from an affronted local suggested it was libel (or slander, can’t remember which he said) and more seriously, “religious vilification”.

The school principal, the art teacher and the Festival representative all apologised for any offence, the artwork was altered, and the explanation given – the student intended it to be a comment on the commercialisation of Christmas. But this is not good enough. The local paper, scenting a lovely juicy controversy, has inflamed this issue and now we have graffiti on the street art, we have abuse and bad feeling, we have the social media going mad with suggestions that the student in the case be tarred and feathered and then burned at the stake (sorry – made that up) – or rather, expelled from school and the teachers dismissed. It’s hard to believe that adult people are so thin-skinned, so eager to take offence, so little inclined to think and discuss and disagree, while agreeing that we all have a right to our opinion.

Is it because the artist is a young person? Or because it’s street art? Or because it’s art? Or because it’s part of the Festival? Or because the town didn’t get the pokies venue some people wanted, and there’s an element of the community that wants to pay out on the arty-farties and blow-ins and lefties? A customer in the bookshop where I work today came in saying he’d been speaking to one of the locals, who told him that the Festival was done, over, finished. The town was sick of it. This offence was over the top. There would be no more sponsorship.

Over what? An image and some words you can interpret in a number of ways. In some ways Christmas – and by that I mean the credit-card-wipeout family get-together hell turkey-dinner celebration, and not I repeat, not the birth of Christ – is a lie. We don’t know when Christ was actually born. Our 25th December festivities are based on pagan rites, adapted and taken over by the church. And we lie about Christmas to our kids every time we say that Santa is coming and he’ll bring you some presents if you’re good. And then again, the reindeer suggests that perhaps that Northern European imagery isn’t appropriate for this country. Or perhaps the black reindeer is a naughty reindeer, and he’s telling Santa that Christmas is a lie so he doesn’t have to go out with the sleigh in the cold…

I’m upset on behalf of the young artist. How must he or she feel, being at the centre of this ridiculous controversy? I’m dismayed that a young person can’t have an opinion, that he or she can’t put an idea out there without being shot down in flames in the local press in this manner. I’m dismayed that there is no tolerance for differences of opinion. I’m sickened by the zest for hostility and anger that exists, in some parts of the community, in my small town. Oh dear. I am starting to huff and puff too. Another of Sylvia Boorstein’s books is called Pay Attention, for Goodness’ Sake: Practicing the Perfections of the Heart: The Buddhist Path of Kindness. Chapter 9 deals with Lovingkindness – metta in Buddhist practice – and Sylvia talks about how easy it is to think with love and kindness of the people we like. It’s much harder with those we don’t. I find I am thinking some very unkind thoughts at present. Sylvia reminds me that everything that has ever happened to us, and to our parents and their parents (let’s not even go into our past lives) leads us to be in the place where we are right now. Which may be a place of intolerance and thin-skinned anger. Or fear. Or discomfort with change. Who knows?

I’ve sent my letter. The writer John Holton http://johnholtonhereandhome.blogspot.com.au wrote a wonderful opinion piece which was published in the Bendigo Advertiser yesterday. I have done what I can. Time to stop steaming and stewing. The kerfuffle will die down. Hopefully the offended will calm and heal, and the young street artist will come out of the controversy (which would probably totally delight a mature artist!) undamaged and perhaps even stronger. And I will read more Sylvia. Perhaps we all should. http://www.sylviaboorstein.com/

I’ve just read Simmone Howell’s new Young Adult novel Girl Defective. It was an odd experience – kinda new, kinda not – because I was already acquainted with Sky and Gully and Bill in their flat above the record shop in Blessington Street, St Kilda. I knew about heart-breaker Nancy and the brickers and Eve the lady cop and the elusive track “Wishing Well” that gave the shop its name. I’d heard about all of them before; I’d heard Sky’s unforgettable voice and cracked up at her hard-boiled bon mots. And here at last was the whole story.

It seems like a long time ago, but it’s probably only a couple of years since Julie Gittus and Lee Fox, along with Simmone and I, made up a little writer’s workshop quartet. We met regularly – usually once a month – in each other’s kitchens, and read from our respective works in progress. So I’d heard quite a bit of the book, and we’d all talked writerly talk about the plot and the characters.

What can I say, apart from I loved it then, in bits and pieces and unfinished, and I love it now? I love the strong and warm sense of family, even though the family – living-in-the-past, semi-alcoholic Bill and snout-mask wearing Gully – are, as heroine Sky says, “like inverse superheroes, marked by our defects.”  I love the way Sky, a would-be-worldly innocent, fumbles her way through the darkness of adolescent confusion into some kind of light – with a little help from her friends. And the way the story of lost girl Mia weaves sad tendrils right through.

And that that old dame (or is she a broad?) St Kilda is a character in her own right.  The book is noir-ish, funny, moving, happy and sad and wise, with a mystery solved, a little romance and lots of old vinyl.

And I can’t not mention Sky’s fabulous voice. Boy, does that girl have a smart mouth! How’s this, just in the first few pages?

I’d known Nancy three months. She was nineteen and sharp as knives. I was fifteen and fumbling. We met when Dad hired her to clean the shop and the flat. I remember her walking into the room with the vacuum hose hung around her neck, sloppy and insolent like a bad boyfriend’s arm.

And at the end of that paragraph:

Kid, that was what she called me. Or little sister, or girlfriend, or doll baby, or monkey face. Sometimes she even used my name – Skylark, Sky – all in that drawl that felt like fingernails on my back lightly scratching itches I didn’t even know I had.

Reading the whole story for the first time, Girl Defective seemed inevitable and surprising at the same time, like an old acquaintance who becomes a new friend. At long last.

Simmone’s website and blog are at http://simmonehowell.com

…and I went to an International Women’s Day breakfast at the Tea Rooms in the Botanical Gardens. I had to pass on the food – muffins, frittata and the most delicious-looking berry muesli provided and served by our local Secondary College – because of nerves. I was one of the speakers, you see.

The first speaker, Amy O’Neill, does an amazing amount of volunteer stuff in the local community as well as working as a partner in a very successful building business, Vic Restorations. She’s won several awards lately, attended a huge rural women’s conference in Canberra and all I can say is, she must have an impressive load of energy.

She was followed by a local singing group, The Deborah Triangles (local in-joke, that – there is an area of gold-mining called that up the Calder in Bendigo) who did “Georgy Girl” complete with the whistling, camped it up with “I’ve Never Been to Me” and concluded triumphantly with “I Will Survive”. Then I was on. Here’s (more or less) what I said.

The theme today is “Women Inspiring Women.” I’m a writer, so I could have claimed as  inspiration many wonderful female authors going right back to Jane Austen. Especially Jane Austen, though since we’ve just had the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice  she’s practically a deity – certainly an immortal. However my inspiration is human, not a writer and a lot closer to home. But before I tell you about her I’ll give you a little bit of my story.

I’ve lived in Castlemaine since 1986 – with a three-year stint here when I was a child during the middle 1960’s. I moved here at the time I committed career suicide. I’d just given up a secure, well-paid, permanent position as a primary school teacher with the Education Department of Victoria. Why? A year or so before I’d been awarded one of the Age Short Story prizes, and since then I’d been consumed with a mad desire to be a writer. I could have done the sensible thing and written in my spare time or even taken some leave without pay, but no. I thought I wouldn’t take it seriously unless I quit the Department. And so I did.

I had to work part-time of course, but nevertheless in that first year I did a lot of writing.   I won a Victorian Fellowship of Writers short story prize (and that story was later published in an anthology) and I also wrote a children’s story, The Possum Charmers. It was published in 1987 and since then I have had 9 more children’s books published. My 10th book, The Truth About Verity Sparks, was the first to have gained any real traction. It’s sold well, been appreciated by young readers, and – most thrillingly – it was awarded Honour Book in the Younger Readers section of the CBCA awards last year. I’ve got a sequel, Verity Sparks Lost and Found, due to be released in May.

Now, back to my inspiration. I said she was close to home and so she is. She’s my mother, Helen Green. She was a primary school teacher, a secondary school teacher, a senior mistress, and then in the 1970s she became vice-principal and finally principal of a large suburban high school. In those days there were few female principals and fewer still female senior bureaucrats in the Education Department. Which was why her next career step was really an enormous leap. She became Assistant Regional Director of Education for the Loddon Mallee region, based in Bendigo but taking in a huge region going down to Kyneton and up as far as Mildura and to the SA border. She held that position for 8 years, and for several of those years was Acting Director.

My mother was a very capable, intelligent and ambitious woman and she was passionate about education and community. Hers was a very public role. She was continually going to meetings and sitting on boards and committees. She did a great deal of public speaking. This was so even after she retired, when she was active in Continuing Education, Friends of the Library and University of the 3rd Age.

Now, I’m a writer. Writing is a private, solitary, even a hermit-like profession. I spend a great deal of my time sitting on my bottom alone – or with the dog – in my office in front of the computer screen. I’m not engaged in the community in the way my mother was. So how has she inspired me? Here’s how.

She gave me a belief that if you love something, if you’re committed to learn everything you can about it, to work hard and persevere – then that’s what you should be doing. No matter what your gender or whether people think you should be at home with your children or whether people think you’re crazy for giving up a steady income – that’s what you should be doing. My mother is inspiring because she was one of those women who opened up a space for the women who followed after her and it’s a great thing that most women in Australia now take it for granted that they can follow their dreams – whether it’s in the building industry, like Amy, or in the study, like me. My mother is also inspiring because she recognised that setbacks and disappointments do occur. Books are rejected, you hit the glass ceiling. Things do not always work out as you hope. But you can maintain the love of what you do. You can stay engaged and curious. You can keep learning and expanding your vision.

My mother hit the glass ceiling. When she applied for the position of Director, despite having acted for several years in the role, she was didn’t get the job. A man did. She appealed, and she lost. But my mother’s passion was for education and community and it was a real force in her life. She put her disappointment behind her and in the last fulfilling years in her job, she did a series of what my father referred to as ‘royal tours’. She didn’t drive, you see, and so she had a driver take her to visit many remote and rural schools whose communities had not seen anyone from the Department for years, sometimes decades. One of her loveliest memories was of a visit to Murrayville, near the SA border. What seemed like the whole school community turned out, there was a band and a fabulous afternoon tea, and a banner saying “We are honoured to welcome Mrs Green”.

Sadly, my mother died before The Truth About Verity Sparks was published. I dedicated it to her, and when I was presented with my CBCA award in Adelaide last year, in my heart I said as I was handed the envelope, “This one’s for you, Mum.”

Thank-you to my husband for the surprise rose-petal heart next to my keyboard.

I was going to post a photo of my black, blue and yellow swollen ankle, just so you’d know I’m not making this up in a pathetic bid for sympathy, but my husband advised against it. Too revolting, he said. It would turn people off. And in the scheme of things, a bung ankle isn’t all that bad, is it? All I have to do is rest and keep the foot elevated, as the doctor ordered.

What do you do with an elevated foot? What else but read? Polyanna-ish, I decided to make the best of it. Now’s the time, I decided, to get stuck into that pile of unread must-reads that keeps growing on my bedside table.

I started off with The Tiger in the Well, one of the Sally Lockhart mysteries by Phillip Pullman. It’s an exciting and complicated historical mystery set in 19th century London with a feisty heroine and a large cast of characters including some great street-kids, Bill and Liam. I do love an urchin in amongst the aspidistras and antimacassars of Victorian correctness. (It means you can have some swearing, too).

Then I read The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle by Catherine Webb. It was also an exciting and complicated mystery set in 19th century London. Unlike The Tiger in the Well, which dealt with real Victorian themes of anti-Semitism and the (lack of) women’s rights, this was sheer historical fantasy. Hero Horatio Lyle, a former Special Constable and amateur scientist, battles an otherworldly conspiracy that reaches into government and the aristocracy, spawned by a race of dangerous legendary beings with glowing green eyes and supernatural powers. He’s helped by another urchin. She’s Theresa Hatch, pickpocket and burglar by trade, and she gets nearly all the good lines.

I’m 50 or so pages into Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones by the time I realise…

Well, not only that my bottom is numb, but perhaps my brain is too. I remember reading Fire and Hemlock when I was a young teenager and loving it, but I’m not making any sense of it at all today. What else can you do with a sprained ankle?

I make a cup of tea standing on one foot and hobble outside. I hobble back in again to get the cup of tea. I sit outside in a cane chair in half-shade with my cup of tea and look at the garden. I think that it’s a bit of a mess and then remember that a kind friend has loaned me enough copies of “Gardens Illustrated” to fill two 42-litre plastic tubs. After flicking through about fifty mags, I realise that my garden is a total mess deserving only annihilation. I attempt to annihilate the leggy tangle of succulents closest to me but hurt my ankle. Falling back into the chair in well-deserved pain (after all, the doctor did say rest, keep the foot elevated, not launch into a deforestation campaign in a rockery), I ponder other ankle-less activities.

Nothing in the housework line. After all, it was housework that got me into this. I was on holiday at the beach – the sea was only a 5 minute walk away and the sun was shining – and I decided that I should go into the back yard and bring in the washing. Why oh why did I think about the washing while on holiday? The long and short of it is that I missed a step and here I am, with new bruises coming out even ten days later, and out of action for 2 to 6 weeks. No gardening. No housework. Then I had a bright idea. I thought, I’ve got it! I can sort out my filing cabinet.

Sad to say, I only got as far as dumping piles of stuff all over my study floor, looking aghast at the mess and then walking out again. I closed the door so I don’t have to look. A big bonfire, once the fire season is over, seems the simplest way of coping with these so-called ‘files’. However, I tucked a couple of scrapbooks under my arm. Perhaps – a manageable, gentle kind of job, this one –  I could paste in all the cuttings from newspapers that have been multiplying in various baskets and boxes around the place. Perhaps. Or maybe I could read…