Category Archives: Sandshoe

Never Far From The Truth:

03 Sunday Jan 2021

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Foodge expelled the breath of a man of all reason – aka Leon Trotsky

Episode One Billion in Some Parts

Written by Shoe – Direction and Photography by Mark.

“Granny can’t be all that deaf,” Mark was remarking. 

“I’m not going as Death,” Granny hollered. The cellar’s a long way. From is even longer by the time Granny climbs the stairs after a few quiet ones.

“Fancy dress,” Algy explained to Big M, “They’re holding an Allusion to celebrate we’re all in a better place.

“There’s a row of them in a big wooden box,” Foodge heard Granny screech as he walked in. 

“I’m all done in, Uncle Merv.”

Merv set down a steaming cup of milo on the bar. Foodge expelled the breath of a man of all reason. Foodge was a season of reason. No-one dared ask. Foodge was likely to recount. He might recount his entire latest judgement.  Foodge never came away from any trial without a good 40-minute obiter. 

“Come to think of it,” Shoe said aloud. She thought she was only thinking it. “Foodge comes away from every trial like a man glued to postal mail.”

She wrote it down. Benj, new proprietor of the bookshop suggested, “Like a George the Fifth?”

So unnecessary. Overstatement of an adhesive. Strictly speaking, it had been used before.

“If we could make them a little less corny.”

Mark was remarking.

“Not again,” Yvonne groaned. Yvonne could barely breathe for fear if she stopped holding her breath in anticipation, Shoe would say nothing more, write nothing, least of all think. 

“Breathe, Yvonne.”

Mark had it in hand. He placed the bar bill down on the, well, bar.

“I can’t read all these zeroes,” Shoe animated.  “You can’t expect me to pay this as penalty. Three quadrillion billion five thousand and thirty two million…”

“That’s a heart starter,” sibilanted Big M. Big sibilanted in the face of all emergencies. He knew where to toss a vowel in for good effect when needed. 

“Here’s a how-de-do,” Veronica Lake said. Ms Lake is new to that beer-soaked chook-squirt-stained establisment. Everyone remembers the Mexican chooks imported from, well, close to the truth. 

“This is what comes of putting drinks on tick in an ever-expanding consciousness series sense,” Foodge interrupted, “I’ll take the case.”

Three Boozers

29 Friday Jun 2018

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THREE BOOZERS

Worsted Verse by Shoe.

Three boozers being blotto

And sick to death of Keno

Took on themselves entire change

Of course out of their baggies

Into kit less dog-eared

But their prospects were the first to rearrange.

Said the first I am a loser

I have never backed a winner

Not a horse, a game or dog on this life’s track

The second said I’m surer

For my hair’s just like fencing wire

And my teeth are all quite stained from drinking rye

The third said I’m a fibber

The biggest ever hired

I am a proper spinner

I never et my dinner.

It seemed from where they lent

Their trinity bespoken

That could they get some other besots

Lead all to heaven

The chains upon all mortal souls

Theirs, ours, yours, broken

God above, Best On High The Holy

Would smile on their affray

And grant World Sanctimony

Hence back and forth and forth and back

They gathered each to other.

Boomed a voice…

“TOO LATE YOU CAN’T COME IN!”

“Wait on! Most Lord God On High Your Honour

We are a protest movement

Bit wobbly, but full of moment

And you all look like DONKIES with the mange!!!”

(It could of ended better).

Charles Smith

15 Friday Jun 2018

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The Mini

 

 

Charles Smith

by Sandshoe

I recently was handed a box of my papers I have not seen for 30 years, forgotten other than those I thought were lost. The thought process behind writing the partial first draft of this piece came back to me clearly. I was pitching to write out of character. attempting a psychodrama cross horror story with elements of crafted confusion, the surreal and provocation to laugh.

My former position of employment would soon be made redundant by the introduction of technology about to revolutionise the workplace. As an active member of the union and elected to speak for the staff to management, I would never have voiced ‘revolutionise’. I reflected later on the disappearance of a form of employment few would know of and its conduct in a room with a building view overlooking other buildings, from a chair in the room a view that was the colour grey and bleak or of rain or blue and bright at height the length of the external wall, the weather through an industrial warehouse-style window.

The waiter rolled down the stairs.

“Come back here,” I screamed, distraught at the evasive tactics. I don’t suppose you would understand the difficulties involved in having a loose grip on reality. You might seeing in others the potential of their losing theirs.

We are by definition so much better at watching others than ourselves.

My duty is to not assume, but warn. You could even be sitting next to me on a bus.

I warned Noag. He laughed. You can’t afford laughter any more than Noag could. You never met him, did you? No, of course not. I had buried Noag even then in the deepest recesses of recall for so long, my imagination gave him shape and appearance.

You will never find him.

What you will meet with is with yourself saddled with my neuroses as well as your own. You began to read thinking, didn’t you, that you could forget your own for a while your hands clutched around this publication, your fingernails almost sunk in. You sank, instead, into its grateful embrace. You probably started feet up. You sent the kids to Coventry. If you do not have any, you wanted to forget worrying about the ones you didn’t have. Opportunity eluded, time deluded you.

I have never had any children. I never will. I hate children. Children clutter buses at peak-times. They toddle along in harnesson pavements, meander, alarm running red and sweating in gym clothing. So many knees and elbows in school groups and pushing and shoving and teachers blowing whistles.

I thought the driver was never going to stop the bus when it started to scream. I was trapped in a beast, a classic outcome of mythology, its soul emergent as an unnerving high-pitched whine from within, the single note and its harmonics like a buzz saw, a monotone of unremitting frenzy-cross-rational logic attuned to the sorest point that is unknown.

What’s wrong with this bus, I thought.

I didn’t see anybody else thinking the same thing. The aisle was blank with suspense. I did see a round ball of slimed and white chewing gum land on the point of focus of my meditation. A passenger near involuntarily I supposed discarded the material. I imagined the ball projecting through a mouth rounded to permit that habitual exit. I could step on it. What best purpose might I attach to that. I order everything, you see, into good and bad and why.

Would I get to work on time? Stupid question. Buses never get anybody to work on time unless the journey is begun in the hours before sun-up by striking a match. Yes, my subjective analysis. They, the antagonists in all legends, cut off my electricity just as I was about to pay the bill. At least some of it in the hope I would be standing as anticipated in the illumination of the porch light when the landlord came by for the rent. It seems reasonable to assume that where there’s power, there’s hope. A landlord cannot feel confidence in a porch lit in a deepening twilight by a tenant shielding a spluttering match.

I will bruise my brain one day taking public transport instead of the Mini stuck in the garage. The jolting and the shudder of the bus was terrible.

I have high standards. I have high expectations of myself. I am my own standard and hyperbola. I studied Math that did not work out so well. I took on Political Studies. I was busy. Elsewhere. I flunked so I did not get the job of Secretary to my local Member or of anywhere. Instead I am in this business. Publishing and I read. Everything that is put in front of me. Not on my own. We read together, you see. My workplace is a room of babble. No matter the noise pollution. I’ve developed an evasion tactic that, to date, has kept me my job. Just as I am about to deliver a neurosis as finely tuned as a pitch fork, I go to the gents.

Well, one of us reads out loud and the other listens, the pairs rostered to minimise the blood shed, close on 40 people at desks, four supervisors and a Head Reader seated at a side-on desk out front left. The content of the daily newspaper and other publications is read thus every day, all day and more from the time you leave your work and go home into the dark of night that is the night of our despair.

Readers do. Have a loose grip on reality.

The bus slowed. Not ‘slowed’ as if coming to a stop. The bus slowed yet progressed forward as if the driver had formed no intention to stop. The passengers might have to jump the driver, take control. We were not in a democratic accident inclining to equity, but hapless dependants. We can only imagine ourselves on a level playing field where there is hope, not haphazard luck and its opposition, mishap. The screaming bus sounded as if it was climbing a hill where there was no hill. The floor of the bus shuddered.

A reader would begin reading the text of a paragraph such as I have written above thus: new para cap T definite article space bus space and so on. What is on the page and is otherwise not, designated ‘space’, is vocalised as having entity, place, status or subservience. Everything becomes ascribed purpose and dimension. Commercial ads, lonely hearts pleas, even syndicated crosswords are read. One period down river. Two period across bright. Check the solution. Does the solution match and fit.

Funeral and In Memoriam notices circulate three times which engages the scrutiny of six staffers.

What carminative could I find in reflection we care more for the dead than the living. My bowels gripped in the pain of retention of flatulence. I held my guilty secret forever more against my better judgement weighting good, better and best.

You know, few faux paux and mistaken attributions find their way into print. Each partner holds a copy of the proof. The reader may offer the copyholder they read and the reader listens in the assumed role of copyholder.

What can possibly go wrong.

Imagine the way reflected images in shop windows are seen to change viewed from the window of an inner city bus. Flick flick flick. Readers and copyholders do not stop reading when they walk out onto the street after between 8 and 12 hours a day reading everything given to them including poetry and space. They continue to read. Their eye identifies out of a world of viewpoint anything that can be read, a word, a punctuation mark or more and tests the strength of meaning. Their habitual task in their workplace is an entity of powerful will.

Gathered school children at a stop followed the sight of their scheduled bus passing them without deviating from its forward path. Their faces aghast, they waggled and waved school bags, blazers, outstretched arms. Suddenly the bus clanked and came to screaming rest. Its engine cut out. The screaming stopped. I leaped out of my seat in fear of mayhem and doom, explosion. My suit and shirt collar were sodden in a drench of fear of a colleague literally reading a report of my untimely death to a copy holder: cap c charles spell that out (pause and listen to copyholder) space cap s smith spell that out (pause and listen to copyholder) punctuation comma lower case f formerly indefinite article an employee of…

The fellow next to me who waited tables at The Metropole Hotel dining room and I were first at the exit. I merely pushed him out of my way. He pushed me out of his. As I stepped forward in haste to flee the bus, he pushed me aside again and in retaliation as I grabbed for him and he turned back, I turned and directed the heel of my smart shoe backwards. I felt the impact on his shin bone as the heel connected. My blood up, I was spoiling for a fight as I turned back to land him a blow. He was flailing his hands in the air. His legs were tottering his body helplessly forward as I struck out at him with my readied fist.

After I screamed at him to come back (when he rolled down the stairs), I was pinioned in a citizens arrest and secured to a bus seat with luggage strapping.

…top right column photograph of a man caption under (reader, pause) cap c charles spell that out (reader, pause and listen to copyholder) space cap s smith spell that out (reader, pause and listen to copyholder) punctuation comma lower case indefinite article an employee of…

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 16

30 Saturday Dec 2017

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The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 16
by Sandshoe

The tolerance and creativity of the community on the beach arose out of the empathy travellers feel for like-minded travellers. ‘We’ included domestic refugees seeking other than disposession, happier environments than those that were once home by geographic placement, birth allotment, associations and at odds with conservatism by lifestyle, cast against a background burden of war. R&R deserters found their way to that harbourage. The community knew trauma and acknowledged trauma. The growth of community represented the growth of voice, individual resistence and collective will, a youth movement certainly as more youth gathered and swelled the numbers, but more, a local and universal movement of people of all ages and background that was growing.

The weight given the inference that all resisters were opposed to the welfare of homecoming soldiers is a sad outcome of the Vietnam War. Between ourselves our individual stories struck chords that revealed a common awareness of justice and

War, what is it good for

injustice, but never the pillory of individuals. Nobody either mistreated anybody who expressed a different viewpoint from the mainstream of the beach community opposed to continuing involvement in the Vietnam War.

Instead I reflect on the potential waste of people everywhere who make creative community. attract the best of virtuousity and not to neglect the worst of vice in all its guises. Vice is usury. I have not included in this account the sheerly fantastic of which I know only half stories, of empire builders. The originals of us were innocent of criminal activity albeit cognisant of agency amid the dangers of handing anybody over to authorities, their potential undoing on political grounds, as scapegoats, as undocumented, as simply set up by powerful individual others and the implementation of the Mental Health Act among the possibilities.

We became canny because we ourselves were in danger.

‘Hippies vs Hairies: the early Australian counter-culture in Kuranda North Queensland’, entered in 2013 as an Honours thesis at James Cook University by Rohan Lloyd deserves accolades particularly for his choosing community as a pivotal identifier of history. Rohan describes the beach community as a forerunner of the contemporary

Karunda Hotel

community of Kuranda, which is where this juncture of my attempt to describe the sociology of housing experience leads to. I had written this text in first draft as well before I found and read Rohan’s thesis, all the more interesting from my viewpoint because I am invested in inderstanding the meaning of community. Many different ideological stems and sources however can be traced to Kuranda including Kuranda had a pre-history of ‘alternate’ settlement by individuals and groups.

The beach community, too, found its place in social history because of an enclave of residents tolerant of difference. Holloways Beach that I have not previously identified so as to depersonalise it I read many years ago in popular news media was a gathering place of ‘widgies’ and ‘bodgies’ previous to the Vietnam War-era of ‘hippies’. The same article suggested as well the pre-condition existed that I am calling tolerance of difference (I cannot remember what the article called it) because Holloways Beach was the home of crocodile shooters attributed as ‘community’ and that their origins were European (true). Kuranda albeit identifiable as containing an ‘alternate’ culture or counter-culture is as complex as the beach community was.

Rohan further draws inference in effect the beach community was a hippy community that lost its essence in Kuranda by virtue of ideological conflicts driven by stress

Rohan Lloyd

between attitudes inherent in ‘commune’ and the drive of individualism.

Social movements are complex. Individual and collective experience gained in a period of persecution and resistance has a heart beat. As invisible or seemingly extinguished as a community driver may seem assessed neighbour to neighbour or in members of a once common group divided by circumstances as international refugees are, a common knowledge of a greater reason for living than self drives the same core individuals’ actions and reactions in their respective spheres of influence. What happened on the beach created common considerations that were short term and longer at the point when the beach community was called ‘finished’. Its participants engaged some only solutions that were common including that locations other than Kuranda were eventual destinations whether on the basis of individual choice of environment or presentation of seized opportunities.

The significant factor in the sociology of the beach community was, however that among its members were key enablers of creative conversation for its own sake. The art of conversation created community. The prevalent external factors of disposession

Conversation, I thought you said conversion

and persecution provoked intense discussion of common meaning, of ideology but strategy and migration exactly as villagers of far longer heritage have been documented as doing in the face of threat, settling even in entirety most certainly in a district in another country because of common weal. I lived in Adelaide in a suburb that was home to the inhabitants of a near entire migratory Greek village (I learned from its researcher).

Safety not ideological consideration was paramount.

The local Council would in fact soon exclude the campers on the beach from paying fees by non-acceptance. By that virtue that the campers did not pay fees, they had no voice in Council and behind closed doors repealed was the long held right of campers to the esplanade roadside/beach front strip. Announced was the establishing of a caravan park and camp ground at the farther end of the beach considered uninhabitable for its infestations of sandflies that proliferated where they were protected from the wind blowing freely at the deposed camper’s end. Developers and affiliated interests waiting in the wings stood to make immediate profit through sub-division. Without the least consideration of an innovative approach to its community and inclusion, towards only its dislocation as happens more generally everywhere in phases termed local development, the Council went for the quick buck. Notices of eviction were served.

I stood on the beach on the final day with perhaps two others and the couple whose day-to-day living space in an army disposal tent had evolved into a gathering place, a

Nice tent

first aid station, a design studio, ours the last shared moment of witness to history that on its surface was gone, the beach left so tidied there appeared to have never been a community.

The landlord of the property my partner and I lived in had in the same time period decided to sell the beachfront cottage. He offered my partner and I first option to buy. We were not able to buy and would soon be looking ourselves for a new place to call home.

to be continued…
Christina Binning Wilson

Hmm, Aussies, always pissing themselves.

Another Screaming Christmas

25 Monday Dec 2017

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Story by ~ and photograph of Sandshoe (with Mum and Sister)

My sister ran up the back steps and through the open kitchen door. She makes so much noise at Christmas could be all I need to say.  Christmas 2013 I told you she found out one year the turkey laid an egg?

Remember she sobbed and elucidated and screamed at Dad who was the designated executioner?

So many big words. It wouldn’t have fitted into the oven anyway like it was.

She found the cat’s tail this year.

That much of the cat was known of.

She turned and ran back out the kitchen door and down the steps. We all ran out the door and down the steps. We followed her round the house to the front fence. A bony end of a tail and some length of it was hanging from a rusty barb of fence wire where it looped through a post.

My sister wailed and wailed. She was so good at it. I felt faint.

“Dead,” she whimpered, “Cat’s dead.”

My mother and her mother too (of course, never mind my vulnerable years exposed to my ear splitting older sister’s capacity for empathy) whirled towards her. I supposed a gesture of reconciliation of life and death.

My sister screamed and sobbed, “Dead.”

Dad said (he was a scientist remember), “No reason to imagine the cat is deceased.” The ‘r’ of reason as rich as a Scotch plum pudding rolled into the spaces between us all and they were filled. We were a Christmas table scene, stock still, you know like the Wise Men and everybody standing round looking at a holy remnant of baby Jesus with their mouths open.

My sister howled.

All of us were shocked. About the tail I mean. Our two parents, two big brothers (honest they were big), and my sister and me. I was 6.

“Dad, she’s upset,” Mum said.

My sister’s howl pierced my eardrums, as uzh-u-al, memorable for sure, maybe for the neighbours. “Where’s the CAAAAT!!?

I wished she would calm down a bit.

“Leave it there,” said Dad as Mum reached forward.

Mum thought better move it. A bird would peck at it or something. What about snakes. Dad said the cat would come back to its tail. I think Dad didn’t know a lot about cats.

“Yes, yes,” screamed my sister, “Leave it alone. It’s the CAT’S!”

She stalked off across the yard and down the side yard of the house where we had run to see. I followed anyway. The others were running after my sister.

What happened next speaks to me of a post-traumatic group stress disorder pre-condition. The noise that came out of the back yard (the rest of them I was following were only rounding the rain water tank) was blood curdling. She (my sister) was standing looking at the cat on the prowl towards her in the way cats do intent on rubbing themselves on a familiar leg. What was left of the cat’s tail stuck out pretty well behind it. The end was ragged, tipsy. My sister looked terrible I’ll be the first to say.

“She’s not DEAD!”

The assertion seemed factual enough comparing the evidence and weight of probability.

I was happy. I wanted to know if the cat remembered its tail. Would it go back and find it? I got a mop handle and broom and set up an observation tent with an old blanket tied to the fence and a hessian sugar bag for a tent flap. It never.

 

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 15

22 Friday Dec 2017

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Picture of a bikie minus the bikie

 

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 15
by Sandshoe

Still on the beach with the beach community…

A southern based bikie gang arrived one week-end and endeared themselves that they respectfully asked what could they do to help the community. To suggestion they help pick up weekend townies’ litter that otherwise would discredit the campers, they as respectfully patrolled litterers.

The female partner of the couple whose army disposals tent was meeting place was a

Aren’t nurses wonderful people

specialist nurse. She achieved a senior position at a very young age. She and I strolled along the beach and shared why we had left our professional positions and training. Her decision too she arrived at on grounds of protest and concern about the status of her profession and working conditions.

The economy of the local store at the curve of the road onto the beach boomed. The dramatic influx of domestic and international travellers brought new influences to bear on local food supply. Wholemeal and grain bread was near unheard of. My German friend I had campaigned with to alert the business world to the travesty of the seizing of the painting and the subsequent court case asked in a stentorian voice in a busy Cairns City central bakery to buy a loaf of bread. Once served, he stepped back from the counter, pushed the loaf down to its smallest possible size with two hands, rolled it into a ball he stuffed into a pocket of his khaki trousers, uttered the historic guttural statement, “It’s rubbish” and walked out. Not something I would think to do, but there again I was not yearning for a stout heavy grain loaf of bread and a beer garden.

“We are going to the pub”, R. announced one day when my partner obliged him we would be transport and helping hands on one of our friend’s wheel-dealer runs. We had arrived at a location on the Atherton Tableland. “No,” he announced firmly when we arrived. My partner and I had started towards the lounge.

On his insistence we were there to exercise it transpired the right legally awarded women in that year (1970) to drink in a hotel bar, the three of us walked in the street entrance of the pub’s front bar.

I was short of 21. The legal age was not dropped to 18 until 1974. None of us gave it a thought. My age was not challenged. I might have been however the first femme in the bar. The entire attention of the patrons was rivetted on us. The silence was

The Cans Hotel

audible. Served, the three of us awkwardly sat on the bar stools available to sit one next to the other. We sipped on our beers. R. said abruptly, “Come on. I can’t stand it.” His voice was so replete with quiet determination to leave, my partner and I stood and followed him as he walked out. We were all glad to exit. We left three beers unfinished on the bar counter top.

Yet R. favoured the look of an Australian worker in khaki work shirt and trousers and work boots. His headwear was always a battered Australian bushman’s felt hat. Nothing to see there. Perhaps my partner’s abundance of over the shoulder curls was not so usual in a country pub in 1970.

The diversity of stories shared grew in kind. The community’s members and local residents were swept up in experience that evolved out of their neighbourly relationships, become actors in real life dramas as moving as any we find where humans group; great love was seen to be found, love triangles were absorbed, trysts negotiated, international intelligence agency (not too intelligent) revealed, a history of individuals who shed their anxieties, abandoned their worldly goods, collected new accoutrements. The red double decker London bus conversion that was a mobile home and mechanics workshop double parked.

The stories of the double decker bus and our new friend’s varied fortunes are legend. News was an ice cream shop was opening in Cairns. The double decker was driven to town for the clamouring purchase of different flavours of icecream in cones for a busload.

Pizza enhancer

A report in the local newspaper, The Cairns Post, cited the bus driver who picked up schoolchildren in the morning as noting ‘they’ were all still in the same place when he returned in the afternoon. ‘They’ hadn’t moved from where ‘they’ waited for mangos or coconuts to fall into their hands to feed ‘them’. Other reports fabricated or interpreted people smoking roll-your-own tobacco were smoking drugs. I recall someone’s voice enquiring ‘What’s marijuana?’

We read standing in a group, craning our necks to see the one newspaper, that we were hippies.

“Hippies!”

I remained alcohol and drug free with exception I once experimented in the period, on my request supervised and ingested a small number, perhaps three, of the psychadelic mushroom, ‘the blue meanie’. I lay on my back in the grass of the back yard and my neighbour looked over the fence and laughed as I laughed. I found a fascination in the shapes of clouds that seemed to speed from one composition to the next. In the cottage bedroom blemishes in old paint on the walls assumed crocodile-like skin patterns that made me laugh for the absurdity. I lay on the floor to look at the ceiling. I was entirely engaged in the moment and realised I was lying on the floor gurgling in delight. My only further memory of it is that I sobered. The interesting thought occurred to me I had regressed. I do further believe that regardless happy chance I stumbled on recall of the baby within.

Such an outcome would not be everybody’s experience or mind construct. As result of

Hmm, these mushrooms are magic

observation and over the course of my life hearing of the experience of others my viewpoint is the ingestion of psychadelic mushrooms or any other common hallucinogenic is potentially dangerous.

If I was not habitually sober and drug free I would not have enjoyed the ease and depth of of relationship I did with the key members of the community who were as well habitually sober. Discussion increasingly turned to how and where to buy land.

Someone’s idea to buy a block of land as a collective we would manage as a camping ground appealed to the group. We would provide harbour to anybody in immediate need of safety from persecution.

Our land scouts brought back stories of being apprehended by police personnel and harrassment. One real estate office telephoned the police and when the two men emerged from the office after making their enquiries they found the street barricaded at both ends by police cars. They were arrested on suggestion of vagrancy and spent the night in jail. In the pocket of one was a list of all the names of the people keen to contribute money, thought to be their list customers and they drug dealers. We, instead, early identified key identities in the real estate industry we thought suspect of collusion with authorities, of rigging land values, and bidding up land auctions.

Meanwhile, the observation thought newsprint worthy that the “hippies” when the bus driver drove past were always in the same place hoping for coconuts and mangoes to

A couple of hippies

fall into their hands held the smallest grain of truth.

The couple who had established the army disposals tent as living space … that the surround of became a gathering place … were establishing a screen print design clothing business. The bus driver’s return journey coincided with afternoon tea.

A resident supplied the assistance of his premises for manging the screens and printing. Among the women of the community were experienced industrial machinists. Bikinis were stock-in-trade. Men’s and women’s shirts and women’s dresses were added. I enquired of interest in a line of children’s clothing. I drafted small girls’ sundresses and supplied the front panel for printing with a design I was asked to first approve or reject. The printed panel was returned to me for assembly.
An order came in from a local flag shop. I sewed small marine flags when they were printed.

Another of the community adept with a movie camera assembled a technical team and a movie was made intended for commercial promotion.

to be continued…
Christina Binning Wilson

Is that dress ready Shoe, tides comin’ in

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 14

14 Thursday Dec 2017

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Me? Offensive? You must be joking.

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 14
by Sandshoe

The writer apologises for the delay in presenting Part 14. Here provided is a link for readers to the previous Part 13.

https://pigsarms.com.au/2017/11/02/the-sociology-of-a-place-to-call-home-part-13/

The accused had purchased the painting from the artist, the same one-time friend of my brother and a local resident. The artist was fearful, especially concerned he may become the next target of police attention and potential vandalism.

I had known of the artist’s intention to the painting. I critiqued it for him as he asked of me when it was completed. I thought the work was excellent, regardless a departure. The artist was a landscape painter. He did win a major award with a

Sorry, I don’t do nudes

beautiful seated female nude. This instead was of a female nude lying across a bed on her back and her head hanging back over the bed edge at the forefront of the painting; a figure barely more than a semblance visible in a doorway at some distance from the main subject I knew was female. I am unsure in recall if that could be easily determined.

I have not viewed the painting for now 47 years so I do question my memory of the exact detail , but the colour gradation and palette; however perhaps a third of the height of the canvas was painted in an almost monochromatic dark charcoal-hue other than for an implication of a source of light behind the figure in the doorway. The nude lying on the bed was a work of realism in the style of the artist’s landscape paintings. I knew he sought a Renaissance depth and perspective. Nothing is revealed of the personality of the room neither its contents. A seeming dispersal of light coated the tones of the skin. I do not remember a racial description. The hair colour was I believe dark. The artist moved about a middle third of the painting out of the dark of distance to an effect of depth beyond the bed.

My admiration of the painting remains the sense of still moment.

The painting was seized by police who searched the accused’s small wooden boat in the belief they would find drugs. They had exhibited as was anticipated of their raids little discriminatory care of his belongings. They produced no search warrant, Not finding drugs of any description and perhaps foreseeing the need to establish an alibi for their behaviour in full view on a public beach, the police alleged they were walking

Hand over your money, um paintings

not far from the water’s edge past the location of an open boat parked stern to bow facing the esplanade road. They saw the painting. They were confronted and offended.

Thus the truth was eliminated that they had pulled the accused’s belongings every which way out of a meagre forward cabin where the painting was lodged for its protection from salt encrustation and sand in a surround of clothing.

The accused was seriously frightened. The thought alone of a conviction on a charge of anything terrified anybody were they vulnerable and exposed to what was potential of being continuingly apprehended by members of the Queensland Police Force, but the accused was from the UK, not an Australian resident or citizen. Serious consequences were potential affect on his future if judgement was pronounced in favour of the prosecution, to only be deported to the UK with a highlight of a criminal prosecution for obscenity.

The criminals must have been laughing as the saying goes. Some years later, 30 years ago now the Fitzgerald Enquiry in Queensland established irrefutable proof of the long-term involvement of key figures at the highest levels of government and policing in corruption and their financing through protection rackets, gambling and prostitution.

Meanwhile, back at the beach community, resourceful individuals put their heads together as is the wont of people of integrity where community and its reputation is at stake and kin fearful of corrupt administrative governance at every level, its members living with a siege mindset, their homes in danger of ransack.

A local lawyer was engaged whose reputation met the requisite critera that his genuine interest was the accused’s welfare and social justice.

What were the qualifications of the arresting officer to establish an artwork is obscene, offensive and to whom is it offensive if so and why.

I witnessed my first life demonstration of the practical use of mathematics and

An innumerate

experienced the wonder. For anyone to see into the boat’s interior from where the police alleged they had and were concerned for the public, minors for starters were ruled out beyond reasonable doubt by trigonometry. A passer-by needed to be 12 feet tall (3.6m).

Nothing would ever cause the accused in the circumstances to even smile we were to realise. My heart went out to him as result of my assuredly announcing by way of pure instinct the next stumbling block the police would meet with was no professional artist leastwise in the immediate district would witness the painting was obscene per se. The police would present in court without that evidence. He abjectly anxious announced to me I was to remember his entire future was at stake.

The feeling of sorrowful guilt that I failed when he needed comfort to assist his anxiety has never left me, remembered of course because I nevertheless learned a valuable life lesson about the relativity of perspective.

In place of others who chose to not be recognised for fear of immediate reprisals, I attended in clothes I hoped again rendered me conservative and unrecognisable. My responsibility was to deliver my court report back to the beach community without

Shoe goes to court in disguise

being apprehended and charged on any pretence. The community’s members anticipated retaliation for what was assumed an inevitable outcome the case would be thrown out of court.

The courtroom was packed. A hotch potch of business suits and brilliantly coloured and sequinned gowns worn by people I had never in my life seen and hair styles that were glorious, dreads and shining, gleaming, beaded, braided filled the gallery standing room only and and my memory for this life time. Permission for observers to stand respectfully was further granted. Where everybody came from I do not know.

The magistrate doused periodic outbursts of guffaws. He warned contempt of court. The court fell quiet. The trigonometry was presented with grave attention to its detail by diagrammatic representation.

The accused described himself as being on holiday from the UK where he was a merchant seaman by profession. The accused made the revelation he was a former student of art at a UK art collegeof reasonable renown. The police prosecution persevered that the depiction of nudity in a public place was offensive where passers-by did not expect to view nudity; however declared the painting in the same breath as obscene. The reason was advanced that the painting showed an obscene relationship.

No apprehending police officer in their right mind would consider in my cautious viewpoint presenting themselves alone in a public courtroom as witnesses of their own assessment of an artwork. They did. Advice on the grape vine was they had tried to

A rough sketch

engage at least one local artist so what I had surmised proved true. The police officers attested when asked to having no training in art. The magistrate enquired of the arresting officer what Michaelangelo’s sculpture of David meant to him in the scheme of things. He drew an entire blank. The confused officer had no idea what that was.

The accused cross questioned by the magistrate what was the meaning to the accused of the painting advised he intended to take the painting with him on his return to the UK as a memento of his holiday in Australia. Why did he buy this painting? He bought it as a study in ochres. What did he consider was the relationship between the figures in the painting? He had not considered the subject matter of there being two figures in the painting. His interest was technical. He repeated he valued the painting as a study in ochres

The magistrate advised the accused that he, the magistrate supposed the accused would not display the painting in, say the front window of, say a department store in the main street of Cairns and the accused agreed; if the accused had not, the magistrate could not find the painting was displayed in a public place and neither intention. The accused was exonerated of the charge and free to leave the court.

I interpreted the magistrate’s inclusion of definition of a public place achieved the unexpected clarity of a finding opposed by inference to the controversial seizing of art work by the Queensland police out of display in a public art gallery and equally to its

The Magistrate

being potentially seized out of a private home or display in a private art collection. The court’s packed gallery of observers were cognisant to restrain their exuberance until they exited the court room.

In the evening I recited the court case near word for word to an assembled group sitting cross legged on the floor at my feet. My capacity with memory had been well identified as a skill of no small function. The charming detail remains in memory that the next day the accused was no longer burdened with anxiety when I commented to him that the police as I presupposed appeared no doubt perforce without an expert art witness. He asked to my surprise and in wonder how did I know.

I did not know. I interpreted the status of the intelligence and experience of the police purely on the trigonometry presented to me by the mathematicians. My immediate thought had been that if they had not thought of the detail they could not view the interior of the boat from where they had claimed the painting was visible to the public, they would have likely given little or no consideration to how difficult the next step would be of enticing a local art specialist to testify the painting was obscene.

Why did I presuppose the responsible police officers could not forward themselves as sufficient and suitable witnesses?

Perhaps it did take a local and former Queensland University student who was a victim of the Queensland Government’s Education Department to hazard an informed guess what the educational status was of the Queensland Police in 1970.

No maths. No art. No deductive reasoning. No common weal.

to be continued…
Christina Binning Wilson

Pleece HQ

AI Is no Chook Raffle.

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Sandshoe

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Only 50 cents a ticket, finger lickin’ good…

 

Story by Sandshoe.

AI is no chook raffle.

“Won’t get off the ground.”

Sandy and Gordon were gettin’ another earful. Gordon got cocky. Instead of keepin’

Gordon steadies himself to sing

strictly in time with the karaoke-singin’-to-Gordon, he went out on a limb preachin’ AI well under the stormy weather.

“What happened to Blame it on the Bossy Nova? Tell us moa, and when, now” yelled out the patrons bit under the stormy weather.

Cue the protestors.

“ALL ducks are quackers.”

“Big statement. Right on.”

Everyone in the crowd started feinting, yeah, imaginary boxing moves in the air and proved they were replaced by AI robots spoilin’ for a setup. “Go, you young turkies”, they chanted. They tick and tocked all over the place. It’s virtual reality noiseworks. Made to sound like bangin’ out a good story on a typewriter. I think not. I miss the sound of the carriage return.

(Carriage return).

Yes, this is me and my name’s Shoe and I’m here to help.

“Nah, it’s untrue.” Gordon was unusually loud for a man and woman of science. He looked same as the tablecloth with Sandy’s beer that fell accidental on him in the name of science. Which was when Sandy threw it at Babel. More beer per chook more production.

Babel was already the best layer. Sandy’s judgement was affected by cosmicness and

Princess Layer

the lightness, Merv had too much to do to be affected, he had to run a pub. He kept saying it into the mirror behind the bar. He got Angler and Gib back from Hornsby. Someone did because they are both round the place.

Mangled, melodic mountains rock.

So Merv put up with a lot of addressin’ himself in the mirror. Granny was brewin’ up a sunny day. Foodge helped Granny titrate.

It’s a full-on battle now. AI reckons the brewin’ is not a generic statement of factual engagement, but a politico-fraco-fungal statement revealin’ unrest and the cellar is a metaphor.

Nice try.

Granny’s brewin’ be buggered it’s simple and it’s science. Sandy’s spewin’ about Babel pooping in his beer it’s that simple be buggered not a lot of science. Ok, Gord is the

A fresh beer Merv!

whole works, reality speakin’ in a runny eggshell. AI test checked Gordon O’Donnell as she and he.

Yeah, hahaha, likely story and we won’t fall for it. We’re too sofistickated.

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 13

02 Thursday Nov 2017

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Home is home

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 13
by Sandshoe

I was offered a job in a prawn processing operation. The manager insisted my Japanese language qualification was why he wanted to employ me.

I was applying only for a job sorting prawns on a conveyor belt. I made it clear I could not converse in Japanese. He would have it that it mattered not a whit. I would be circulated through the operations to learn the business. They dealt a lot with Japanese

Dem is yummy

clients he said. He added I would not be standing all day, every day sorting prawns.

In the days following, I considered the effect on me of inevitable, as I saw it, failure. A competent mental health practitioner would have identified I was in no condition to decide either way. I mistrusted the manager regardless his pleasant reception of me and enthusiasm. I longed to trust him. Fear consumed me. I telephoned from a public telephone box and declined the employment. I feel in memory the horror, the immense anxiety I suffered making the call because I had failed.

With the steady accompaniment of the lull of waves breaking on the beach sand as I fell asleep, woken by a drench of sunshine blazing through the verandah lattice, I was in recovery. When rain drummed on the roof in a tropical downpour, the waves crashed

Some gentle waves breaking on the shore

accordingly and I listened, watched lightning illuminate the lattice on stormy nights. If I wanted to access companionship I walked through the sand to the community camped along the beach to meet with groupings of itinerents and residents of every level of education and professional background, siblings, singles, de factos, marrieds, children.

The campers slowly spread along the edge of the esplanade road that was intact from where the road off the highway curved right at the beach front. Set back at the curve to allow a traffic turn-around was the local store. Where the road straightened past the curve, the first camp in the line had been set up a couple who secured a second tent for sleeping and converted their original accommodation in an army disposals tent into a day-to-day shelter by rolling up and fixing the sides of it permanently open. A wooden cable reel made a serviceable table. A few steps away, a free standing tap on the beachside provided a source of water. Directly over the road was a public toilet block.

The surround of the opened tent became a gathering place. Twists of humour were shared with cocoa at night for the regulars as an occasional treat, honed was the risque and profane in displays of impromptu theatre, ideas flowed. I relaxed in companionship that bred a sense of belonging and identity, kinship based on empathy. Life long friendships were established.

My partner was 15 years my senior. He had walked out of his business address at North Ryde in Sydney one day result of an affair of the heart and returned north. He had only recently returned to Sydney from an expedition collecting orchid samples.

His promising career as a landscaper/nurseryman and nursery owner whose abiding passion was flowers began with gardening as a small child with his mother and after a short stint as a clerical assistant when he left High School with 12 years apprenticeship in the Sydney Botanic Gardens. Among the books in his small library were two that

Sydney Botanic Gardens

were fascinating and beautiful and may be rare that I cannot find either listed. One was an early type of American Home Manual, a source of knowledge of conventional European and native American Indian herbal remedies and medicines, veterinary advice, cultivation techniques, lifestyle wisdoms, exotic recipes. The other was a handbook of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Ceylon. Both were published at the turn of the nineteenth century.

When we met, he worked as a glass house attendant for the Department of Primary Industries in a position of underemployment that was not well paid. He was not always well treated in a junior position. His work environment was so torturous in the middle of a tropical summer he fainted and swooned in fitful rest periods on the concrete floor under a bench laden with plant specimens that variously included confiscated Customs items.

He was a yoga exponent. Allan Watts was his go-to. The mystics of sub-continent India and Tibet, Madame Blavatsky, the Theosophical Movement, the entertaining politics of

Just call me Helen

the vibrant local Healthy Food Society and Healthy Soil Society were his afternoon conversations with neighbours, an artist/writer who was also an emigré from the south and carried his afternoon jug of beer the few houses down for a break from his work, an emigré political activist from the field of aboriginal land rights, a one time friend of my older brother when they worked for the railways who had retired to paint. On the beachfront in the early evenings convivial time was equally and as easily spent peopled by road trip travellers and one described of the highways to the south a stream of hitch hikers on their way north, the movement of youth out of cities. The swelling population was supplemented by people from Cairns’ suburbs they drove from to join the conversation on week-ends.

One immediate neighbour was an avid reader of 50s and contemporary 60s American novels. He introduced me to science fiction and a range of counter-culture writers I knew of, but was schooled in by his passion for them. I re-read Vance Packard and took out of the frontispiece of The Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier that the relationship between them necessary to write it was their primary outcome.

Around me was endless stimulation to think a tolerant and creative community is the key to human success and greater happiness.

I learned to sew by making my partner a pair of white sail cloth zippered, placketed, banded, Bogart-pleated, cuffed, formal/casual dress trousers I drafted the pattern of

Adam Gilchrist’s mum Enid

out of an Enid Gilchrist Pattern Book. I had conceived the idea of home employment dress making. When I made next a princess style short and white cotton dress, my client said she loved the gament. I doubted she honestly was happy with my work and sought no other customised sewing.

For the kitchen window instead I made scalloped-topped calico cafe curtains I orange tie-dyed with my partner’s help and next a multi-coloured-tie-dyed calico curtain that divided the front latticed veranda into bedroom and living room.

The flooring was sea grass matting. The cottage took on a look of creativity. Not until I was told six years later by a mother of a schoolfriend of my oldest daughter that I am a creative individual did I wonder I should think that through and why she said so. She was an Art teacher. The notion I was creative per se was alien to me.

An administration that sends a teacher trainee out into the field without formal training in the principles of creativity has to be wondered at in this retrospect.

Yet on the beach surrounded by technicians from a range of professions and artists and believing I could not draw let alone master the mediums of the trades, paint or sculpture, I lent my sincerity and encouragement. The return was I began a transformation and I was delighted I was sought after to critique for them in person

A bad Q’lander

what I thought of their newly produced works. I believed in art and its appreciation as expression of self and societal mores no different from spoken word. I was an ideal audience and supporter, differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, willing to view creative artistry without prejudice more especially that Queensland’s repressive regime, its manipulation of outmoded law, was stirring up vociferous protest against the closing down of art exhibitions and theatre performances to suppress dissent. I understood the politics of art.

The artist who knew me first in the context he was a one-time friend of my brother knew me as a small child. As he left the beach cottage one day after enquiring of my viewpoint on a new project, he made the quixotic comment that the only place my father went wrong was to educate his children. My father was point of fact no different in respect of his passion for art from his earliest childhood that we spent hours together trawling through travelling art exhibitions for the excitement, the turn-on of a famed or little known portrait, a landscape, brushstroke, colour palette. My thoughts went to considering he and I together gave equal regard to a draughted straight line if a work demanded either his or my attention. I had taken to entire heart the role of audience as an emotive and aesthetic discipline.

My mother was sensible and sensitive. She showed me the beauty of the Australian bush and I learned the outcomes of benefit to be found of isolation in the bush environment she grew up in. She loved the naive artists who with no formal training work out of only the creative impulse. As I now formed into an an adult in an environment of acceptance of me as I was and sufficient I carried my parents’ legacies in their individual and greater parts right into the centre of my activity as a dissident. Theirs were the qualities that gave me the place of tolerance and belonging where I was safe.

The Council stopped accepting camping fees. Developers were vying for land to build spec houses on in place of the campers in the way and heavy earth movers their anticipated contracts to raze the scrub that stretched untouched from the beach front to the highway. On week-ends we watched nervous to protect ourselves from a growing number of hoodlums on Sunday drives disturbing the peace. Screaming obscenities in regard to women was popular sport. The police showed up more frequently and drummed up charges of infinitely petty content. It became impossible to ignore gently behaved and slim younger men who were handsome in their white cheesecloth and light cotton outfits and wore their hair long seemed targets because they were attractive looking; more especially in comparison with their malicious tormentors. The men were treated with the scare tactic of mockery of their girlfriends’ fidelity. Women were propositioned. We abhorred the police. Court attendances were on the increase. The most well known ploy was the selection of harmless individuals off the streets of small towns and charging them under the Vagrancy Laws that specified the carrying of a specific amount of cash that if not found on the apprehended person would suffice to make an arrest. The Vagrancy Laws were blatant discrimination. As an ABC Producer announced to introduce an interview in 2004 referencing the Vagrants Act:

If you’ve woken up in a Queensland stable this morning wearing a pair of felt slippers, here’s the good news.

The Queensland Parliament is repealing its Vagrants Act, so that being found in a stable or wearing felt slippers outside at night will no longer be a crime. 

Insight onto a period that represents one of the most significant of my life that I found a place and people I felt great trust in that my peers and mentors respected and treated me with courtesy cannot be better provided than by describing the way we were thrown together in solidarity to resist the attempts made by the Queensland police to discredit the community. One significant incident was the wrecking of the

A mess if ever

contents of the cupboards of a young pregnant woman in a neighbouring rental home she had recently moved into out of a temporary home-made house built for her in the foreshore scrub. Coffee, custard powder, salt, spices, everything that was foodstuff and recently installed was upended and strewn the surface of her kitchen bench allegedly in the interests of the police finding drugs. She was pushed aside. No drugs were found. She was shown no search warrant. A skilled activist of senior years and neighbour instigated a successful move to support her. Question was asked of impropriety in the Legislative Assembly of the Queensland parliament recorded in Hansard under Notice, 2 September 1970, headed ‘Forcible Entry of Residence by Police’.

The senior police officer who led the invasion was a regular nuisance. The community desired he lose his job. I know only of hearsay that was the result. He reappeared in my personal experience of him in different employment some time later. I find some small gratification only that it did seem he lost his credibility as an alleged champion of what is right.

Another camper who lived in a small wooden boat pulled up on the beach was charged with having shown a painting alleged to be offensive in a public place. The community went into ‘heads together’ mode naturally. A lawyer was identified who was known to represent social justice. The argument for the defendant was established. To the entire anticipatory delight of the rest of us any argument the police put forward could only be

Boat life can be rocky at times

discredited and potential, again, was their downfall. The accused albeit was miserable. He thought optimism was unwarranted and right enough he suffered through the merest thought of having a criminal charge against his name and further on the wrong side of the law in Queensland. Another camper and I volunteered to our meetings held at the tent to traipse one mid-week day around the city of Cairns to businesses where we thought it likely the manager/retailer would be sympathetic to our promoting the upcoming trial date. The brief we went with on behalf of the accused and the community was to fill the public gallery.

We were driven to respond with passion on behalf of the arts and theatre communities of Queensland and Australia entire. In 1969 a series of moves against the arts community and its audiences had seen the banning of recordings of the musical “Hair” and the fining of an actor on a stage in Sydney for uttering an allegedly obscene word. Aubrey Beardsley posters had been seized out of an exhibition in Brisbane. A responsibility had fallen our way to contribute to the defeat of prudery and its manipulation by powerful interests waging no less than a war against the least evidence of gatherings of people suspected of conspiring against corruption believed to be rife within every level of Government the length and breadth of Australia.

Any number of persons out of the community on the beach could well have been agents however to promote the trial to the wider public. The collective political skills and sense of justice of the campers and sympathetic residents were manifest. My now fellow agent in this exercise lived on the beach esplanade roadside in a Combi van. He and I had formal business clothes primarily. We were ofttime companions on excursions he made collecting and buying scrap metal he sold on to a scap metal merchant so I knew him to be a skilful negotiator. He was held in the highest regard on the beach for his personal and professional skills that had initiated his original entry into Australia from Europe. Nevertheless as we set out I felt a moment of angst at thought of his fascination with the capacity of Australians to swear. I lightly wondered his pattern of usual beach speak as an ESL speaker might not be entire unto the needs of presentation we were looking towards did he become defiant … always comedically … whereupon might he lapse into scattered use of the one swear word that impressed him most. It occupied spaces needs be where the English word escaped him and the rapid flow of a sentence was at risk, so much so he was fondly nicknamed ‘Fuck “Fuck” [Surname: a model of motor vehicle]’.

We would have been seen in such a good light that day, earnest and sincere, in wholesome good health, dressed in formal civvies, tall and good looking, as pretty as a picture. We were similar in age. We were a team and very good friends. We could not

Cairns Magistrates Court

together have shown more skill seeking to charm the birds out of the trees to fly down at the appointed time and fill the public gallery of the Cairns Magistrates Court.

Still, unsure what the response would be of the proprietors who could not leave their business address at the time, I contented myself word of an upcoming censorship trial would spread like wildfire and the police involved would be a laughing stock, best if a raft of the business people of Cairns witnessed it.

to be continued…
Christina Binning Wilson

Didn’t think you were going to get away without a cat picture did you

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 12

17 Tuesday Oct 2017

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Qld. Teachers College Graduates 1763 (Hint: I’m in the fifth row at the back)

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 12

by Sandshoe.

Females were directed to wear stockings. I did not initially believe it.

When I confirmed it was a directive, I asked did anyone know of requirement other than it?

Not any reference to style of presentation?

Nothing other than a directive that sounded perverse.

In tropical North Queensland? Nylon stockings?

Well, the rest of us could

I could not bear the thought.

I told another female student I had decided to not wear stockings. Her look of deep concern frightened me for her. I had expected a conversation.

She warned I would be in trouble.

Over stockings?

Where but in a furnace of hell in every respect had I arrived.

I wondered I might even get expelled. The Education Department might find this as a reason difficult to explain. I would make it a difficult argument. I would present myself as immaculate. I chose a formal sun dress, new and fashionable,

How sensible

discrete with an over the knee hem. The shoulder straps were wide and neckline high and straight. The dress fall allowed me room to move with ease. I wore a new pair of flat dress shoes. My hair was neatly pinned. My finger nails were immaculate.

No make-up. Nothing aggravated me more in Primary School than a teacher who spent repeated time every day at her desk with a make-up box open on it so she could look in its mirror and apply make-up. I spent more time that year standing outside on the verandah with my back strictly not in contact with the open door or wall we had to maintain our posture clear of. Being sent outside would only result in the Headmaster I adored catching sight of me and coming past to ask what my misdemeanour was. I would be sent back inside to sit down. I was pleased as I was naughty in that class. The teacher instead was miss goody two-shoes. She carried with her a change of shoes she slipped in and out of. I had found a cause.

I was reading a book, sir, because I thought it was free time, I wasn’t working, sir. I asked my friend for a rubber instead of asking Miss X for a lend of the one on her desk. I was talking to

The book was called “The Accounts” by Dodd G Accountant.

someone, yes sir, and Miss X told me I should be working and to mind my own business, yes, sir, I’m out here a lot. I will be good, sir, no sir, Miss X put her make-up box away, sir, in her cane shopping basket.

Most days through that year, I read a book I concealed under the desk and went to the library the next afternoon to get another one.

A teacher looked up to regard where I was standing at the door of the staff room where I was now assigned. She supposed I was the teacher trainee. She was glad I was there. She was busy. Had something to do. I learned only the class was a Senior History class and asked the length of the period as she walked with me to the room, waved me in, but turned on her heel and left.

So much for the teacher who it had been said was waiting to receive us and would brief us, would help, don’t worry about a thing. I had received no training in the methodology of teaching history. I had received no training really, in regard to the wider

1+1= more or less 2 but not 3

subject of education and its requirements. Nothing about legal status, safety, presentation, relationship with parents. Nothing.

I saw at first glance I was perhaps three years older than the students. They seemed to never realise how close in age we were.

They were stone-like. I was the enemy. Their faces frozen as if suspended in time simmered, pouted, stared at me in resentment. They sprawled, their legs spreadeagled under their desks, lounged sideways, were scrunched into themselves and one studied with apparent deliberate purpose out through a window, his elbows on the window sill where he had pulled a chair. I was not surprised. The students and their school had a reputation. I introduced myself and asked what were they studying.

They either did not know or did not intend to tell me. I would love to hear their names, however I demurred adopting pretence nothing negative had happened. I addressed each in return with a greeting and their name. I was naive of formal instruction in ice breakers. I was stalling for time to think.

Each responded on the cautious side. They were civil. What next

Vroom, vroom

I was wondering. I had read ‘What is History’ by E. H. Carr. I hit on an idea. I would lead them into a tutorial. They, instead of my teaching them as I had nothing to teach them with, would fill the time by talking. My only purpose was to leave them happy with me. I would see if I could warm them up by saying something.

We should really look, anyway, at history. Seems to me, I said, we are best equipped to study history if we talk about what history is. We need to understand what we think it is. We need to know what each other says it is. We need a common understanding because otherwise we will not know what we are talking about.

Their insolent manner thawed. The sprawled, the lounging sat forward. Some turned part or entirely side-on swivelled towards me. I could not allow a feeling of surpise distract me and I set it aside.

They warmed as each spoke up, randomly, to describe what they thought history is. I chatted with each student in response. Nobody interrupted another person speaking or argued without thought. I did not need to urge anybody to speak. I wrote nothing on the board to not break the mood, stayed in front of the teacher’s desk, leaned myself back on it and variously sat on the desk edge with my feet on the floor. They had moved closer to each other and grouped.

I saw by the tableau they formed they were comfortable with each other, friends.

Amateur people watching was paying off. I was no longer filling time. I was deep in saving lives based on what I thought might be true of the reports I had heard of the students at the school. I steered them to look at human relationship in the context of today’s history and yesterday. We are contemporary history. History is less than a minute ago. Lives can be changed in less than a minute. Every year we go back, we have to rely on other people to explain to us what they experienced a year ago, a hundred years ago.

History is an interpretation of what happened.

Respiration sifflante Australien mate, où est la putain de bière

They were studying The French Revolution they told me. They had not read the text for the day. One of them offered me their study book. I chose to not risk accepting a text I had not read, viewpoint my experience of the Physics text in High School. I might be aggravated by the content. My excuse was that as they had not done their homework it was their homework again so they were ready for their next lesson with their teacher. I suggested always so much better. Reading the text, they might like to think about the ideas they had come up with about history, what is history.

Let’s consider the French Revolution then. Fortunate I had read ‘The Crowd in the French Revolution’ by Marxist Historian, George Rudé. I ad-libbed, spoke about oppression of the

Georges brother Rodney

people’s voice and inequity, the nature of revolution and successive struggles, reducing revolution to human behaviour when people are without means of support and led by ideas of social radicalism that can reveal a result is not their liberty.

Did they want to say anything. Time was almost up. I did not want to give them much more time to engage me in discussion.  I did hope they would name the elephant in their room.

One said Vietnam War, Miss. I think we should not be there. That’s what the protests are, revolution.

A lot of people think so, I answered and a lot of people think we should be there and there was quiet reflection, some students nodded mildly. I thanked them for their attention and said how much I had enjoyed meeting them.

I asked them were they happy at school.

One beautiful lad stood as if he was the designated spokesperson

A purse-carrying nancy-boy speaks up.

by previous group decision. I remembered my appointment at the same age. I remember, vividly, what he said and his ease saying it.

He said if all the teachers were like you, Miss, let us speak to them like you have, we would be happy; if they talked to us like you have, asked us questions, taught us like you have… he trailed off and added, rueful, it’s this school, Miss. He had half turned his head and looked out the window at other buildings visible through it and looked back at me. Every student’s face was serious. Everybodys’ gaze was steady on me. They might well have intended rebellion when I walked into the classroom. For now they had material to think on. I thanked their spokesperson without comment on the school and called class end.

The teacher had not reappeared.

I found her in the staff room and leaned myself against the door jamb. I had a question for her that was all I could think about. My words were confident, passionate, sincere.

“How can you stand the Education Department?”

She shot her reply walking towards me. Her mouth was tense, I interpreted bitter, you’ll be alright when they break your spirit.

She was in a hurry, no enquiry how I fared, what the content was. She added the one further friendly word thanks meaning my taking her class and she was gone.

I felt for the teacher and I liked her for all the little of her I

Icy veins if ever

knew. My blood ran ice cold hearing the notion advanced my spirit would be broken.

How could I ever forget the details of this experience and the essence I have extracted and remembered given everything that had come before it. That the Senior student felt I had taught the class and shared the secret that was the elephant in their room identifies why I survived my life through regardless the Queensland Government’s fractious effect on my confidence and well being. Ameliorated was my extreme misfortune I contracted to and met some of the more poorly educated and ill defined, ruthless people I would ever by getting entangled by my matriculation in the lure of a Fellowship with the Queensland Department of Education.

Unbeknowns to my parents, I flew to Cairns most week-ends. As result of meeting the man who would become the father of my first three children, in the bookshop as it happened where I had applied for employment the summer holiday before I left to go to Townsville, I had attached to the midst of the alternate culture that was a disparate group of people living on a beach north of Cairns in rental houses, their own private properties, tents, Combi vans, caravans, eventually buses, boats on the high water mark and concealed in the foreshore scrub in grass thatched and corrugated iron lean-tos.

One week-end soon after my Prac, I extended my stay by two or three days. My neighbour in Townsville in the half-house attached to mine who rarely intimately spoke to me rushed to

If you add half a house to half a house you get…

greet me when she saw me walking towards our residence. Her face showed grave concern. Did I know the police had searched my place while I was away she asked me.

Fear of the Queensland Police Force was rife. Organised crime in Queensland was rumoured to be managed and protected by corrupt police. Police were said to offer favours to young women in return for sexual favour. Excesses of police brutality against leaders of the protest movement against Australia’s alliance with the United States were well documented. I primarily felt vulnerable because I travelled frequently to the beach where residents and young people and older, travellers from the south and overseas were attracted to the core group. Most were opposed to the Vietnam War and rejected Australia’s involvement in it.

My neighbour said of the police they were there for ages. What frightened me next was it did not look plausible they had been or had searched. I searched, to try to identify if drugs of any variety had been planted on the premises that I knew to be a common ploy. Finding nothing, I wondered if the police it was claimed had searched went to great trouble to cover their tracks they had been. I had no reason to disbelieve my neighbour. Had the police known where I was. Might they return. Neither could I as I saw it risk asking the TTC administrators had they phoned the police. Not a word had been said to me at College.

Here was tipping point thinking on the Teacher’s Training College. I felt very frightened. I packed up. My memory is blank what

Spot the chick with the Watneys Red Barrell tits

arrangement I made for the transport of three years’ text booksand not either with the real estate agent, although I assume I handed in the keys.

I walked out without a further word to the Department of Education or to the College.

I have never known what assessment was awarded my first teaching Practical.

My parents were devastated. We were estranged.

My parents and I never discussed what happened that in less than three years I had dropped out. Years later I expressed regret to my father that I assumed he paid out my contract. He replied affably no, he wrote and asked to pay it and was told the file was closed. He had not paid anything. That was lucky, I said, confused. I’ll say, he answered affably.

My only real regret is in regard to walking out that it ever began. I regret I do not know what became of the children out of the only classroom in Queensland I taught in under contract. I

Constable Dutton – Qld Pleece, brown paper bags only

wonder from time to time how the other teacher trainees fared and where their careers took them.

At first my partner and I lived in his rental cottage with a beachfront view.

The beach side properties were far narrower than usual suburban blocks. The dwellings had been built as close to the front of their blocks as possible to advantage their access to the beach. Many of them beach-side as ours did had only for yard an eccentric length of grassed or only dirt car track that set their view from their back doors at some distance from their corresponding neighbours on the other side of an unsealed lane, their hotch potch of tiny front gardens. The view down the lane was of a higgle piggle and humble mix of sand and dirt, stray shell, of fences and no fences, fallen palm fronds, a coconut or two or husk, glimpses of multi-coloured leaves, overhanging end branches of mango trees, plain and simple old fashioned hibiscus blooms, here, there, an occasional frangipani.

An esplanade road had long eroded and its nature strip until the cottage sat in beach sand drifting through a lattice frontage that enclosed a verandah. The frontage adress was nullified. The address was the lane at the back of the property.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

 

My old school…