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The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 13

02 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Cairns, Christina Binning Wilson, Hair, home

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

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, teaching

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…

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 11

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, Townsville

I’m sure I read this story somewhere

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 11

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

I was identified some years ago by a former student that she and I were likely in the same year at the TTC in Townsville. She messaged me we had so much fun.

I lived in my new rental half-house in Townsville alongside a family with small children. My neighbours were tenants. I liked their presence. Our louvred home sat squat at distance from other properties in a spread of dark and dank green lawn, bungalow-like although covered in as if wrapped in sheets of fibre board as after-thought. My residence was dark and quiet inside. Others might see gloom. I liked my half-world within a world and its promise of sanctuary.

The nature of letting agency is to never reveal the downside of low cost

Low rent housing

rent unless it is blatant. Legislation need is the enshrinement of the principle of disclosure without exception where a domicile is a health risk.

I never opened the windows. The rooms filled with mosquitoes otherwise. Before I left to go to College, I lit two mosquito coils in each room. When I came home in the late afternoon, where linoleum had been visible was a black carpet of mosquito carcases. The floor had to be swept and the broom cleaned. I lit a coil in each room. I went to bed early. I swept the floors first thing. I lit a coil in each room. The coils I lit first thing were not burned out when I set up the two further coils in each room before I left for College.

The heat and humidity were terrible. I feared the coil smoke in the atmosphere would kill me as surely as mosquitos.

I contracted an infection in my left ear. I found a medical practice. In consultation I was coaxed out of anxiety to accept the treatment procedures included syringing my ear. Two years before as result of

All ears

mismanagement of the consequences of a cane beetle (lepidiota frenchii) flying into my left ear, I ended up in surgery and hospitalised for a week, surgery near four hours according to a nurse.

I wondered how gruelling for the ear, nose and throat specialist who was surgeon.

I had come home from a square dance at the school my final High School exams over. Someone had left the bathroom light on and the window open. I walked through a beetle swarm in the bathroom. My parents woke to the sound of my screaming without stop as the beetle’s scrabble tore at my left drum. My father put end to the agony I was in by pouring methylated spirits into my ear. Our doctor sartorial in his pyjamas at his residence and attached practice attempted to dislodge the dead beetle.

I felt the drum bulge outward. I feared wrong wrong wrong. The drum was damaged further and although he had not extracted the beetle, the

This won’t hurt a bit

doctor syringed my ear until I insisted he stop. My father attempted to rebuke me. I knew better. Requisite was a specialist. The beetle as it transpired was in pieces in my ear drum and wherever else.

That I accepted the advice of my new Townsville doctor treatment was to syringe was result of his competent management of my anxiety with the help of a cast of ancillary staff. He prescribed antibiotics after I was grateful.

The first or subsequent day of TTC, the class assembled, we were advised a Deputy stand-in for our Senior Administrator would be speaking to us. I supposed housekeeping and an address about course structure.

He was there for the reason we all might wonder to tell us exactly what we were. We were failures. He curled his lip. We were nothing but stumblebums.

He leaned forward to impress on us what we were. We would all know he suggested. We would not be there if we were anything else. He

A stumble bum

repeated stumblebums. I did not know I was one, not knowing the word or that everybody else in the group was. I glanced around and saw rows of impassive faces. My gorge began rising.

We were to know our place. He quivered with indignation. We could not expect to find the same facilities we had left where we had come from (sneer) because we were pioneers. We were at the beginning of an important future, this was our project. We would work.

We would find we did not have a big library. We would have a fine library. We had to understand these were early days. The University is over there, he waved his hand.

I did not exactly know where, even though I was a High School attendee there.

We would think we could just come and go as we wanted, but no. We were not to be found there (sneer), we were not to go there. We were here. This was our place. He waved his hand. We had wasted our time

Your place is over there

enough. We got on with it. We were to make the best of the opportunity we were given to make something of ourselves instead of being failures, stumblebums.

I do not know what he said about housekeeping and course structure. No idea anymore. I was shattered.

When the group filed out onto the verandah every face was impassive still. I feel acute embarrassment. I came out through the door enraged. I see myself standing aside on the verandah with my hands part out-stretched and withdrawing them, helpless, seeing person after person walk by me as if I was not there, disengaged to say nothing, respond to nothing. I expected a huddle of protestors. I drew the parallel I was in a militarised zone that reflected Lavarack army barracks was somewhere in the vicinity.

I remembered the coup at the beginning of my last two years at High School.

Discussion that led to it had been concern each of us felt about the way we might be treated by a teacher assigned to one of our subjects. He had graduated to teach High School. None of us had him as a class teacher at Primary School. We each because of his reputation he was a bully had

Did you say primary

thought we dodged a bullet. We did not want fear to stand in the way of our ambitious resolve to do well and matriculate. We decided to set down day one our collective concern and expectation we would be treated well.

Had we experienced behaviour such as I had as introduction to teacher training I believe we would without exception have stood up and walked out of the room. It was the resolve between us at High School we would were we unsuccessful. That one of us was appointed to introduce the subject and I to address the teacher being clear I was appointee remains one of the highlights of my experience because each of us committed to achieve an end greater than any individual end. We eliminated fear.

Reflection suggests consideration of financing if teacher trainees lost by rebellion their second chance to acquire qualification or, as we were, partial qualification.

A survey of the socio-economic backgrounds of tertiatry students in 1967 suggested medical students came from the highest and teacher trainees from the lowest (D.D.Anderson and J.S. Western from Pattern of Participation in Australian Post-Secondary Education) and were less likely than university students to have fathers in professional occupations.

In the 1930s it was said the majority of students in the arts and science pass courses came from public schools because, according to one La

La Nose

Nauze, most of them were student teachers paid by the State Education Department (D. Anderson, Department of Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences in “Who Gets Ahead?’1983).

Anderson suggested nothing changed and uses the word I did to describe my regard for my Fellowship, lucrative, in reference to studentships paid by the State Education Departments in the 50s and 60s. I note his claim former State school students at University less commonly made applications to do Honours than fomer private school candidates because Education studentship holders were “directed to pass and broader degrees”. He extrapolates:

…and for quite some time universities were training far more students for the teaching profession than for all the other professions combined. For the first time all qualified students were not able to gain admission. Competitive quotas were filled according to what was euphemistically called ‘order of merit’: it was based on aggregate examination marks.

I emphasise teacher trainees did not receive an education at University that was different from any other student’s regard to individual subjects. I received no formal training in either education systems or teaching methodology at University. None could be anticipated. I was, simply, an Arts under-graduate.

The Queensland Government across the board spent $34.51 per head of population on education 1966-1967 which calculates with inflation to an equivalence of $421.66.

About $46.00 per head was paid to the school for each student enrolled in the last two years of Secondary School which calculates to $562.05.

In 2016, the Queensland State Government allocated $2, 635.00 per head to Secondary Schools.

My lived experience lends my bias belief Seniors exiting school in 1967 did not proceed to employment, apprenticeships or tertiary education well equipped for the experiences that would be theirs, a number separated from home influence or as in my case result of legislated further dislocation from familiar territory, services, public transport, site of failure.

State government poltical policies and educational priorities made effective through budgetary and finanial controls on state departments of education were perceived to have the most influence on state supply of

Students listening to Burkhardt

teachers 1956-1978 (Geoffrey Burkhardt, Canberra College of Advanced Education in ‘Changes in Factors Influencing The Markets For State Government Teachers in Australia’).

Consider the resourcing of teacher training. Staff at the four Queensland Teacher’s Colleges in 1970 when I went to Teacher’s College was 137 males and 58 women, part-time one male and six women, total 202 staff (Year Book of Queensland).

Total teacher trainees of which 760 were male and 2,326 were female was 3, 086. Gender consideration breaks the figures down to a proportion of 5.5 male trainees to every male staff member and 36.4 female trainees every female staff member.

No matter the number of female trainees was three times the number of male trainees. Female staff was half the number of male staff.

The traditional status of women on graduation was they neither received equal pay or were promoted to senior positions, which was mentioned to me in passing at University at the end of the previous year as

Pie tasters wanted, apply now

disincentive why a friend had not considered teaching as a career. I had not even been equipped with knowledge my pay would begin on a lower rung than men I anticipated in the moment working alongside. I was still swallowing pie.

Any culture that accepts such ungracious inequity cannot expect gracious standards and sound intellectual reasoning to materialise overnight at the coal face of education.

I had skills as an educator when I accepted the offer the Queensland Department of Education made at the end of High School. Sale of the offer to me included it was prestige to be paid to go to University. I thought it was equivalent of a prize. I was without conceit, but proud of the Fellowship, its title seductive. If I was conceited I would not have had the friends I did in every faculty and level of their progress, under-graduate and post-graduate. I had friends behind me galore and interstate. Friendship was par for the course in my final two years of High School.

You can call me Jim

I knew nobody in Townsville I was in contact with, except that somewhere in the precinct of the James Cook University were former school classmates came home. I have never felt more isolated in my life

All very well leave gender off the agenda. I do not think so. The push to denigrate gender studies is an attempt to disguise power and render its critics helpless.

A female High School student had little or no acculturation either that she would even think to undertake an apprenticeship in a trade as alternative to accepting a scholarship or studentship. I had none other than disincentive. Bullying compartmentalises the way we think so we stay in its confine until we are released or live simply our lives out trapped by a belief system that is not of our own making.

1930 through to 1939 women enrolments in apprenticeships fluctuated around 39% at a high. Female enrolment was around 50% in war years and fell again after the war.

This dichotomy of technical education for men and for women was not seriously questioned for another fifty years. (Technical and Further Education in Queensland:A History 1860-1990, Department of Education, Queensland.)

I forced myself to acconpany a trainee buying a motor scooter. She just wanted the company. I had promised. I waited for her to refer to our treatment. She bought the motor scooter and we parted. I attempted the conversation with another student and hit the uncomfortable brick wall of self acknowledgement she was a failure and the student’s concern for her parents’ happiness.

Swimming was compulsory. I had not known. My mindset was I could not swim. I converted thought I would have to learn into believing I had opportunity. Best present and advise I looked forward to instruction except I was recovering from an ear infection and had not thought to secure a doctor’s certificate. There is no instruction just get in and swim, I was told brusquely by a male who was a passer-by, I thought a person in charge, and not that I knew if instruction was not available for me or anybody or if I ever knew. I stood wrapped in a towel over a bathing suit I was unaccustomed to wearing, feeling dismay I have vivid recall of and embarassment, incompetent, wondering what waste of time might be mine if what appeared a dearth of supervision let alone organisation meant I opted for a regular hide-out in the melee…and what child if I did might drown were I directed to oversee swimming classes in a remote location school and ignored I could not swim.

I would have to learn somewhere if it was assumed teachers are competent in water.

Not so much of the old bit

English Methodology class I looked forward to. The book was ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ by Ernest Hemmingway. I had studied it in some previous year and read it again the night before. I can smell the stink of mosquito coils. When the class was asked if there were any questions, I raised the issue I did not really like the book and had a different viewpoint on how to teach it. As you know so much about it, the lecturer said, peremptory, you can write an essay. Hand it in next week. I had responded as I would in a University tutorial, even in High School Senior English. I felt panic, embarrassed, baulked at the thought of the workload, travel time backwards and forwards, day-to-day exigencies.

I made a tape on English teaching methodology when I was at the College. I was revising a lesson, striving to arrive at a place of comfort within myself, competence and compliance. I recently note someone unaccustomed to a young woman speaking like it may think my wording and enunciation is stilted. My voice is deliberated and cultured. I wonder its negative effect potential on a Queensland Department of Education fuellled lecturer.

Not so I perhaps on a High School class.

Trainees were each allotted a school to attend for classroom experience.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

Yes, no, well maybe…

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 10

29 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, sociology

I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 10

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

I found a place to live in on my own in Townsville.

Alcohol was the primary issue.

I well empathised by that time with my mother intercepting my father’s account of being drunk on an occasion way back when. My mother looked up from her crochet and scoffed he knew that was not true. My father said it was true. My mother would have no truck with it.

I saw my father affected by alcohol once. His lowered inhibitions revealed he could crack an inappropriate quip not half. I was 16. The occasion was the one work party it was deemed appropriate I attend with my parents and his quip to a half circle of his colleagues…all male…answer to an admiring reference they made to me.

Fortunate my mother did not hear him. I kept it secret from her. His quip

Fragile…Yes

was racist and sexist. I kept secret from him how offensive it was from my viewpoint. He was fragile if he knew I understood it and I perceived his work colleagues were shocked.

Unheard of in any case had I…as I considered…bawled him out in a private location the next day. I have never repeated what he said.

We can choose to change culture.

I drank in my early experience of University although never in my College room, sometimes to excess. My father and I had a drink at a bar at Brisbane airport on one of several occasions he flew to Brisbane to see me.

Residents of Women College were often drunk and disorderly after nights out. My own ultimate indiscretion rests on walking early one morning from College to attend a champagne breakfast at the University.

Flow on champers…

Champagne flowed. Few people turned up. I had never drunk champers before. The effect was a delicious high until I arrived back at College. I had forgotten Open Day. Residents were expected to host visitors who included parents with high hopes their High School age daughters in transition to University would establish residence in these exclusive premises. My vivid recall is of the trouble to maintain myself upright and walk through a throng of people to escape upstairs into my room. No-one intervened. No-one mentioned it.

My companionship was girls from homes of academic professionals, government ministers, graziers, industry and some small business. The WC song was a collegiate binder. We vocalised satirical concept of our ‘propriety’. Our residence lent ‘us grace at every station’.

Residence for a year and a term was nevertheless fearful containment driven by homesickness. I thought it a coop of claustrophobic imprisonment. In contrast to sun dappling through the trellis of a bungalow verandah, brick stolidity and the daunt of panels of glass on a walkway between the buildings allowed me a corridored view of my housing outside and in especially that I felt anxious electric lights illuminated our traipse across the walkway.

My better adjusted college friends who went to boarding school assured me living in the WC was a cinch. Kindness was mark of my experience of day-to-day chat between residents who were my friends. I loved their friendship. When I heard a discrete rumour someone was bullied by

a bully

someone somewhere in the College who I did not know the concept was remote as if they lived in a distant country. I stood against one attempt. I outright rejected the fresher system of extreme pranks.

I never sought the counsel of the Principal of the College. Likely I carried with me from High School a habit of aloof co-existence.

On habit, complicated that evening meals were formal during the week and we wore our university gowns. The Principal’s gown hem dipped at the back where it was torn and she walked with visiting dignitaries down a centre aisle after we had taken our places. The back of her gown had small rents. Its tattered condition I was incredulous was said to be evidence of her status. Someone catching a shoe heel in the dangling loop the hem made and her falling one evening was nothing compared with anxiety she would.

Rostered students at the Principal’s table withdrew with the Principal and visitors to an elegantly furnished room for after-dinner drinks. Alcohol in

This looks rostered to me…

the College was otherwise forbidden. I dreaded a rostered dinner. If the Principal tripped on her gown. I feared I would deal with it without any grace. I felt foolish sat on a stage elevated above a hall of diners.

If we missed a meal, we were on our own. I had an income and fashionable clothes. On weekends I explored restaurants in Brisbane city. Regular remuneration meant I had means even sufficient to send home a swag concerned my parents were paying my residential bill. My father wrote his thanks it came in handy to pay an insurance bill. I do not know if it was as much money as I thought or his insurance bill was a doozy.

I did not consider playing tennis. I played a high standard at 12 years of age. My mother was a champion tennis player and my siblings. My father who was not accompanied me to competition matches, more often regional games my mother as well. He stood at the back wire fence of

It’s love thirty

the court where he groaned and mumbled instruction at me if I missed a shot. I felt I was an impostor. If my parents conceded to protest I may have made that they did not ensure I took my racquet to College, it was an error on all of our parts.

A close friend who became a professional educator told me in the 90s she knew what I should have been. She said a tennis professional. I was astonished the thought had never crossed my mind.

My father wanted to rail my bicyle to College. I was refused it. He was mistaken to not send it. I did not want to incur expense. Freight from North Queensland to Brisbane looked like unimaginable luxury.

I joined the University Filipino club because I enjoyed its family atmosphere and sobriety. A History club offered by contrast a drinks evening and I withdrew from the slops.

I saw the musical Hair in Sydney in 1969 standing in the last place allowed and entranced. I sat that afternoon in the middle of Kings Cross I

Very hirstute

had visited once as a child with my brother and took a mental snap shot of its now eccentricity that my surround seemed a stage itself draped in flags that were each the flag of the United States. American soldiers on R & R from the Vietnam War and their soft accents dominated a soundscape of Elvis singing Blue Hawaii. I felt suspended in sun and isolation from the mainstream politic. I remain impressed how elegant in uniform and sober the soldiers were as they strolled in and out of one business address to the next.

My boyfriend’s conscription into the Army was averted by student deferment. He was a vociferous opponent of the Vietnam War. I was opposed since the beginning of 1968 when a returning soldier invited me to a secret location to view photos he had smuggled out of unimaginable atrocity. I kept secret his identity.

My great enjoyment was the University choir and Church In the Round I attended with my boyfriend on occasion although I was not a believer. I can find no contemporary reference to the meeting. The congregation sat around the pulpit. The minister was a skilled facilitator. The meeting was participatory. I made one naive address people are born good.

Another resident was leaving College to rent with friends. I was offered a place. Our share house looked over the Brisbane River. The address was

River of …

a romantic aspect and its facade. Inside was a sprawled dump of poverty burdened inmates.

Male associates of my flat mates who were close friends met me at the door when I came home one night in the company of my boyfriend, grabbing at and mocking his wearing a collegiate tie, intimidating and drunk. My flatmates apologised. I did not fit in. They exploited visits to a parental home from where they thieved resources and food. The student might well have been owed as was the answer to my conservative reference opposed to it as theft. I experienced depression relieved by exercising initiative to find other housing.

I shared a University admin professional’s rent in a soulless 2-bedroom flat in a multiplex over a set of shops, but did not like in my cosseted naivety her obsessive talk about a married lecturer who she avowed she was in love with, he with her. I justified to myself I was the fault I had not pandered to her tortured heart when she left abruptly. In retrospect I thought it irony she complained when I applied to move in that her flat mates never stayed.

My neighbours were a couple with one talented child who was High School age. His parents gave me permission to take him to live theatre to

Tom Stoppard 1937 – hasn’t fucking died yet

see ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ by Tom Stoppard. I made him cocoa in my flat after the play. His parents were happy he enjoyed the play, but decided on potential led astray by a University student. He was a 15 year old. I did not resent instruction I was to minimise contact with their son. I instead acquired sad embarrassment as add-on to struggle to find a flat mate.

I chose to move into a soulless unfurnished apartment in a modern tenement building with a final year traumatised by her first experience of a Practical as a Social Worker. She believed she would leave Social Work. I yearned to study independent of the restriction imposed on me by the Education Department. The atmosphere was one of unreality, struggle and student penury. A male friend of ours on our way out for an evening balanced a whiskey on a ledge over a living room doorway. He announced it would be there for him when we returned. I felt intimidated and relief my flate mate had to find housing at distance to access employment she was assigned to.

Accommodation on my own in the furnished downstairs flat of a quaint two story home, a kind landlady living above, provided me haven.

Frocked up in a ballgown, I met the second boyfriend of my life other than early childhood and innocent loves, he tall and handsome dressed in an Airmen’s Club formal dress uniform. The occasion was a society

Nancy boys or girls

event. We introduced ourselves as a waiter offered a drink tray. ‘Never when I’m flying’, he said charming. He flew a plane. We danced a waltz.

My boyfriend had excused himself from me concerned to rescue wallflowers. He was however beginning to look neither handsome or gallant soaked in alcohol at the end of social evenings.

The next time my new friend and I coincided was in the University library, I dressed in a blue sweatshirt with the identifier University of Queensland, white jeans and desert boots, my hair in two plaits. Classic.

He asked would I coffee with him in the refectory basement. A song starting up on the juke box sounded in the stair well as we walked down the stairs together. I heard for the first time George Harrison’s ‘While My

Good man

Guitar Gently Weeps’. I engaged with the exquisite sound and song, swept into the words. I look at you all/See the love there that’s sleeping/While my guitar gently weeps.

I ended my relationship with my then former boyfriend. His grieving I had not factored in. Guilt tortured me. I feared he would fail his year that he was repeating.

The two men attended the same High School.

My new boyfriend called hinself the product of a working class family. He told me in an unguarded moment he had seen me with his former schoolfriend the night we met and decided to steal me off him as one-upmanship. He baldly told me he had resented at school his schoolfriend’s background. He had thought his schoolfriend returned higher grades because of his privilege.

The two men have been successful. The son of a worker has achieved even perhaps his then ambition to be a man of greater privilege.

Meanwhile, either way I felt indescribably uncomfortable being told frequently of his tortured feelings for a former girlfriend. I was single

I’m single mate, trust me, I’m a nurse

again.

In Townsville then the summer holidays ending and my aboritve attempt to find employment behind me, committed to lying to my parents I was happy to go to TTC, I had lived in five different addresses in the two previous years of 1968 and 1969.

I was looking for my sixth home away from home. I discovered the hard way the special disadvantage of the Townsville TTC. The College was in an isolated location. Getting there without private transport was not easy. There was some limitation on bus service to it or was it no bus service that went direct.

I viewed part-furnished rental accommodation with a real estate agent. I felt shocked and confused it was shown to me, a window opening vacant, window frames leaning against an internal wall, broken furniture. It seemed worth being condemned for demolition.

The premises I rented was a securely lockable half-house.

My travel time was near an hour and a half each way.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

I lie around the lounge like this all the time, don’t you?

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 9

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, sociology

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 9

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

My father kept his own secret from me in the year I went to Townsville and from my ill mother.

My mother was crippled with polymyalgia rheumatica that was sudden onset. I was sitting at the kitchen table arranging postage stamps in an album, in 1966 still at High School, summer and my mother at the other end of our long kitchen sitting as was her wont on the kitchen linoleum floor in a breezeway, crocheting with her back lent up against the kitchen sink cupboard. She drew to my attention she had tried to stand up and could not. She was wincing and half up holding onto the sink behind her as I went to help her. By the time I got to her she was sobbing. She tried to walk and screamed and sobbed alternately in pain. I left her where she was, leaning against the sink and recalled my father from work. I asked him to first phone our family doctor.

By evening my gracious and gentle mother was sedated and bedridden.

My mother found some relief. We moved to live in a property out of town. I regret I was keen we move and gave my voice as invited to

 

discussing whether we would accept housing in a sugar experiment

station property that came available and was offered to my father.

When two years and a little more later she attempted suicide in a fit of demented hysteria, her face scarlet, anguished, I was alone with her. I was talking with her where we had been seated at the dining table.What happened was extreme that her mood went from confidential to hysterical and she was on her feet in the second. A tray of her medications was near where we were sitting.

I was home on holiday from University although I did not always fly home between terms. More often I went interstate with other choristers to Intervarsity Festivals and other meets.

My father who was my primary care giver volunteered to me to not come home every term holiday. He wanted me to enjoy my youth. I appreciate his intentions. He communicated a viewpoint that included concern about the impact on me of my mother’s continuing poor health.

So I took opportunity to go on holidays that cost little and were spent in company as much fun in the evenings as our soujourns singing for meals and milkshakes, hitchhiking as we were legally able then, billeted where we could find, a NSW outback lock up when we knocked on the door of the police station and guard dogs we were told to ignore but barking enraged in cages at its door if we as much as moved, in a remote location in Tasmania finding an abandoned settlers home that rose bushes in scattered bloom occupied grown through the roof and its windows, all the same white delicacies set in an encroaching surround of native forest and we drank ice cold water from its cottage stream, a bare dirt floor in barracks without furniture, squashed in a utility sharing talking night long on his instruction to an oil industry trouble shooter to keep him awake on his drive Brisbane to Adelaide, on the Adelaide outskirt a mound of sleeping bags except waking visible to Monday morning workers’ traffic in the central wide strip of a four lane highway whereas in the pitch dark of a starless night and no traffic we thought we had been dropped off at a rest reserve, on a New South Wales roadside in the night and the stars above in quintillion thousands agreeing to catch the next road freighter heading anywhere to escape the cold, my highlight three of us lying asleep on the bare ground flat on our backs in brilliant sunshine spaced like soldiers with the soles of our shoes upright a considered distance from highway bitumen and my opening my eyes on nothing but blue cloudless sky, not a single sound of civilisation to be heard, feeling my heart leap this is Australia, the very expression, fallen in love.

Skool

I am a better socialised human being than I would have been without the explicit freedom to holiday in University breaks. I was never allowed in Primary and High Schooling the social freedoms of my peers and no siblings at home. I feel no part that is manipulative my father volunteered to me I not go home from University. I never complained to him during my High School days I was restricted. When I was a small child and whinged I was not permitted a freedom another girl was, he taught me a sharp lesson. He retorted she’s not my daughter and I thought it was clear instruction.

Once only when I was young I was thrashed which was by my mother for getting home late from the library via a friend’s place, My regret remains my father did not intervene. Once more only in my late teenage years I and my friends pushed a broken down hire vehicle for a very long way to find assistance, but were treated with so little respect by both of my parents I was late home I was incredulous.

I reserve judgement of that part that was my father’s influence in effect on my mother she did not see me and not either my siblings by virtue of their distance for times that were so long they could not have been good for her mental health.

Could I do it again I would fly on long week-ends and mid-term holidays to tend to my mother and my father’s better care. Air fares were half price for students virtue an arrangement of the Students’ Union. In

The Student Union

emergencies my responses were almost always unerring. I would know however the mental health first aid skills I have acquired and avoided the error that distressed my mother.

I had voiced in a kindly way on this occasion of her attempt to end her life, but refusal of her insistence I support her in attempt to convince my visiting brother to return with his wife and children to Sydney and leave them to live with my parents in North Queensland. My brother had taken my sister-in-law who I loved dearly and their children for a drive. I jumped to my feet and with care to support her head because of the pain of her arthritis caused her to gag, extending my hand and extracting in the same move a quantity of pills she had thrown into her mouth screaming she would end her life.

Her decrepit and extreme physical and mental ill health was diagnosed as consequence of the sudden withdrawal of prednisone from its successful treatment of her arthritic symptoms. She was severely ill again without advantage of diagnosis.

The reasons for her catastrophic reaction to my protection of my brother on whom she obsessed and his wife I feared would soon return from their drive with their small children will be complex. My viewpoint is isolation and suffering a chronic medical condition with only my father’s care and companionship crippled her as much as arthritis had wrought its damage.

My father’s secret was angina. He described to me many years on he lay at work across the seat of his utility to stay out of view agonised by gripping chest pains. He had especial reason to attempt secrecy apart from his compromised position as primary care giver for an ill wife. He feared for his employment and he had been offered an opportunity he did not want to forego.

It’s all about love

Due to retire in a few short years he had been an attendee at his first international conference. Despite he described to me like a child as I had never seen him before anxiety he would not measure up on the world stage, he enjoyed academic success and social popularity. The conference was in Taiwan. He had never travelled other than to conferences in Queensland. He was invited to chair a session at the next scheduled conference in Louisiana in America. He would meet up with his new friends.

The only friendships my father had in the scientific community he enjoyed through professional letters to his position and the respect of visiting scientists. Two scientists in Canberra were his only friends he visited once. I was sent to stay in Canberra for a holiday with one of the families.

Being a scientist in the sugar industry in North Queensland and remote from his Head Office in Brisbane was an often thankless position without glamour. I commented to him once he was not so well paid. He said that was not right, startled that did I know he was paid at the same level as a Senior Lecturer at the University when he retired.

I reflected on the years it took to get there and how poor that sounded to me for the days staking field trials, at nights setting and collecting rat traps, away from home writing papers, driving cane farms around in North Queensland’s tropical heat without air conditioning, dealing with chemicals in inadequate research facilities that may have contributed to the poor condition of his heart, exposed to crop dusting trials, a colleague of his who died a shocking death from a motor neurone condition and was refused compensation, his skill delivering public address through radio interview, staff responsibilities and his classic story he had never told anybody but I quietly that I had never told as a child on his instruction of his attempting protest being threatened he would lose his job if he revealed he had discovered using a chemical the rat’s babies were malformed, the sniggering he had to put up with regards his compromised position distributing cane toads when they were released, his tears running down his face when he threw the newspaper down in front of me with the headline DDT was blanket banned and he announced the deaths that would follow from mosquito infestations nothing else would combat…and he was right.

He was flattered by the invitation to Louisiana he had admitted to me when he told me of it, so shy and radiant.

I have a tape recording of excited Taiwanese school children cheering my father and his colleagues in 1968 as they alight from a bus at a village school and among segments of my parent methodically describing in his Scottish accent local sugar industry technology as he

Say no to undies

views it, of delegates taking turns to sing songs, the winding mountain road, the reverberation of the bus engine their backing track, my father’s melodic baritone hitting the sweetest high notes in his solo performance of ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’ … there are hands that will welcome me in/there are lips I am burning to kiss/there are two eyes that shine just because they are mine…

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 8

24 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, sociology

Lets get an, an, AN education, yeah…

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 8

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

I accepted a lucrative Fellowship as a student trainee under contract for eight years to the Queensland Education Department. I was to complete a Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Education within four years and teach for four. My father begged me to accept a Commonwealth Scholarship of lesser value. He would fund the balance if I still wanted to be an Anthropologist. I had talked Anthropology for a year.

My father previously communicated financial worry to me that he was retiring. I lied again without a qualm I wanted to accept the Fellowship.

I was required to attend the new James Cook University in Townsville that was ‘zone’.

My work in the last two years of High School was dedicated to getting to the University and that was always in my imagination where my father, brother and sister had attended. If a subject was not available at the JCU I could go where it was available. Anthropology I considered met that criteria. I was allowed by the Department of Education to enrol at the University of Queensland.

After I moved into my residence at the College, I received a directive letter from the Department of Education anthropology was deemed ‘not a teaching subject’. My incredulity I was required to withdrew the enrolment was impulse to rebel. I enrolled in Political Science.

I expected to receive another letter directing me to withdraw enrolment from it, which never arrived. My intention had been to take the letter rejecting Political Science to a seething campus in the form of Students for Democratic Action (SDA). I entrapped myself. That one of the Majors of my eventual graduation is Politics was founded on nothing more than rage at the grounds on which my enrolment in Anthropology was rejected.

I recognised, belated, if it was not my enrolment in Pol Sci slipped past the notice of scrutineers, the enrolment was a literal red flag and my likely next move anticipated.

Where to go for counsel I had no notion other than to the Department. The small print terms of my contract suggested it was available to me if I had any concerns. I said nothing to my parents to fly under their radar likely to detect disappointment.

The uni looked something like this

When I was at University long enough to get my feet on the ground, I made confident appointment with the offices of the Education Department for career advice. I had read a newspaper report that proposed the potential placement of psychologists in schools in Queensland. Independent of influence of any complexion I had been considering it was an imperative.

My transition to University was the incentive that I was wracked with homesickness. The size of the University was traumatic. I was in an academic stream class of nine students in my final year of High School. The University on the other hand was the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere and only emergent from being the one University in Queensland.

No, said the person I was allotted to speak with. He looked confused, diminished me, there was nothing like that and there never will be. I was stunned. He fell silent. I was dismissed. I had no idea how to persist to make conversation and negotiate with an institution I presupposed would accommodate my enquiry with interest.

I had as well a type of chronic fatigue, not that it occurred to me for many years I suffered those symptoms. I fell asleep at 8pm and slept until 8am like clockwork through an alarm and missed my College breakfast hour. I walked a short distance to University from College for a 9am lecture. I sat down in the lecture theatre and fell asleep. The mechanism of sleep felt like an applied anaesthetic.

I was never woken and never rebuked. English I class as an example was somewhere like 950 students, which seems an unimaginable recall. The class was divided into two sittings. Numbers dwindled at the end of the year as I remember it to a handful of students at the front of the auditorium and I asleep in a seat in the back top tier. Falling asleep in class and struggling into consciousness at its end to leave I experienced as a sense of eventual and devastating failure.

Off ta bed children

No one was more surprised I was awarded a pass for my four First Year subjects of English, History, Political Science and a Pass (Minus) for a compulsory foreign language, Japanese. Pass (Minus) meant I would not be allowed to enrol in further Japanese language studies.

How deficient it was I had no counselling what subjects I chose. I had studied French for five years of High School. I was competent to translate letters for my father related to his work in the sugar industry. I spoke French at our dinner table with a visiting scientist. I did not foresee the use of French. Two of the applicant students as it was had sat at the beginning of that year through being bombasted by the Professor of the Department we had failed an aptitude test, yet persisted with application to enrol.

The brilliance of the intellectual content of Professor Akroyd’s ire that she would have to allow our entry was rivetting. I credit it one of the finest lectures of the privilege that has been mine. The professor covered the status of the culture of Japan and the mindset of Australian young people who were ignorant of Asia and the waste of resources deployed to cater to their whims. I was moved to read her obituaries include a reference she could be ‘prickly’. Not at all. She was enraged.

In my second year of University I attended at the Education Department after requesting an appointment. I felt no option and reflected I must have been unlucky in the previous year. I could not be rebuffed a second time surely if I reported I foresaw I would not pass my exams. I thought my decision to present intelligent. The interviewer reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a folder he opened, He announced let’s have a look. He scoffed. A student like you with the results you turned in. He made it clear I was misrepresenting the case. I was dismissed.

I afraid that’s out

 

 

Recognising I had returned only Pass marks in my First year subjects and of the four I was not permitted to enrol again in Japanese ought to have alarmed him. I was asked nothing. My memory of presenting looks little more than attending an empty room. I wonder now as I write if it was anybody’s office at all I was so rapidly moved on out of there.

No one was more astounded at the end of that year I was awarded a Credit in second year English. Yet I only returned one essay of three I was asked by the exam paper to write. I wrote on William Faulkner’s

William Faulkner 1897-1962

Light in August. I reckoned only I would go ahead and enjoy myself as I was going to fail.

I was well equipped for studies in English from my home background. My advantage was as well that when I was a High School student, I was selected with two others of the students from my school to attend an intensive three-day course in Australian Language and Literature studies for High School students newly instituted by the Foundation for Australian Studies under the auspices of Colin Roderick at the James Cook Campus in Townsville.

I further note it was said by an incoming English lecturer in 1969 he was surprised by the high standard of the work of incoming Queensland undergraduates. Unavoidably I consider the likely politics underlying reaction to the Committe reccommendation soon to be released to remove University lecturers from setting examination papers. The examiner who marked the work I passed in for assessment of my First Year University English assessment might have been inspired to scrutinise the contents more closely than to fail me.

I failed however the second year History exam by reason of ‘Did Not Sit’.

Time to get up

I slept through it not responding to the alarm to get out of bed and attend. I failed my second year Political Science exam that was multiple choice.

The Education Department deemed I had failed second year by not turning in pass results for at least two subjects of three. I was advised by letter from the Department to repeat the year at my own expense or attend the Teachers Training College in Townsville under the terms of the original contract inclusive continuing remuneration.

I applied for permission to attend the TTC in Brisbane. If I was going through with this I needed to remain in Brisbane for that stability. My application was rejected.

Some choir girls

I lost active membership of the University choir for which I had been appointed to Promotions Officer. I lost contacts with friends relatively easy to lose in the days before social media and mobile phones. I lost association with their parents where I had been a guest in my friends’ homes. I lost my city. Brisbane I truly identified with at the end of two years. I lost my proximity to my aunt who had recently retired out of her teaching position. She was now after the death of her remaining bachelor brother living alone in her Brisbane home she lived in her life long since immigration in 1922, my father’s family home and his children’s for succour had I utilised the potential of my aunt and uncle to advise me as my brother had when he was at University. My father was the only one of his four siblings who had children.

I acknowledge my paternal younger uncle who moved away to live elsewhere accepted Legacy children who became his responsibility and that they cared for him in his later years. I hold great affection for them and their loving care.

My potential to access counsel was cruelled by my taking on a degree of alienation from my brother, but as well my aunt because I rejected the offer extended me to go to boarding school where she taught. My brother grieved I did not I would realise later.

The Education Department meanwhile had no motive deeper than to stock its new TTC in Townsville. Who would demand that move of me. I was naive of the crisis Australia faced that was a plummeting shortage of teachers in the 1960s. Murmur, too of a significant gender imbalance was turning some educators’ tables. Married women could not teach as permanent teachers and were not encouraged to try to retain their employment until the mid-70s. In 1966 women in the workforce constituted less than 24%. The number of female teachers at one dip represented well less than 40% of active teachers.

The result I foresaw of accepting going to the TTC was I would be teaching in one year’s time with one full year of University qualification and one at TTC only and I would be 20 instead of 22. We were to finish our degrees externally by contractual obligation. The future looked arduous. I was already anxious a teacher was to undertake one year teaching in a city school and one by transfer to rural or remote Queensland. I saw myself isolated if I needed the assistance of the Education Department in a remote location.

Eight years contracted to the Education Department looked intolerable.

I never considered appeal to my parents. To return to University for one year full-time would have been at my parents’ expense, but as well I would still be contracted to the Education Department at the end of it.

Hanging over my head was the real rub of contractual expectation I repay the Queensland Government two full-time years of University tuition and remuneration paid me.

I forewarned my parents I would fail my second year.

Why they paid no heed is a mystery. I had consistently predicted the status of a result before I was advised other than in my First year University result I did not discuss with them beforehand. My father when I was a small child asked me what I thought I got for my first Theory of Music exam. I said 100%. He told me I could choose whatever I wanted him to buy me if I was awarded 100%. I checked with him on that. Anything. Ought to have struck while that iron was hot.

I said a fountain pen.

When the result came in the mail from the Music Examinations Board, he ordered me to get into the car. I got to pick out a fountain pen at the newsagency. He announced to the newsagent he had not believed me. I could wear that. I understood he reacted and unwisely when I said 100%.

 

He hurt me when I responded to his asking me what I thought I got for my Senior examination. I listed the subjects and points with accuracy except unsure about one. He drew a sharp intake of breath to smother what he was about to say and released it. I recognised anger. He was so rarely angry with me I felt confused. He struggled to modify himself that sometimes people do not like it when our heads get too big.

Never in my life had he before accused me of being conceited.

When the Senior exam results were phoned to us by a teacher who was a family friend, I even reflected without saying anything abrasive to my father he would have been wiser had he remembered the fountain pen. His reaction when I naively had told him my anticipated matriculation results and points hurt me to my very core.

My father cried when the results of my second year at University became official. I was at home on summer holidays because especially I went home to tell my parents I expected to fail. I feared what effect my failing would have on them.

My mother especially was not well. I did not anticipate seeing my father cry. The shock was seering. I did not understand how very far my parents and I were growing apart that long periods elapsed between our seeing each other.

When my father ordered me not to go out in a short sun dress I was ironing to do exactly that, I was more than out of my depth how to cope. I had no acculturation in being told what I could wear. My adolescence was conservative to the extreme. I had been away from home for two years and 19 year old. I packed the dress into a handbag and dressed in jeans, changed into it when I was well clear of home.

My father had no experience of parenting a teenager through to adulthood. He was out of depth.

The further pressure was the politics of the era. The corruption of the Queensland Government as an issue in the wider political backdrop of my experience at University had caused me a growing sense of alienation from my parents’ political viewpoint. Jo Bjelke-Petersen was their man. When my father indicated some years later to a rose bush he planted in the front garden of their retirement home in commemoration of Jo’s wife, dear old Flo…knock me over with a feather. He eventually changed his mind of his own behest, but those long years of aloof care we not refer to my being a dissident were a loss.

I had decided to look for work before I went to Townsville to go to the TTC. I desperately did not want to go the closer it got. I would find a way to go back to University and finish my degree. I would undertake external studies. I would aim to do anthropology and psychology units. My mind ran riot.

Riotous Minds

 

I was chastised by the owner/manager of a Cairns bookshop local to my parents in North Queensland that I applied for a position she advertised for a sales person. The bookshop was a stand out. My heart was set on that employment. I had thought the owner was of immeasurable worth to our district. She was a High School schoolteacher who retired early to establish her excellent bookshop she saw was needed.

I was alienated from seeking position with her ever again.

Go back to University, a smart girl like you, even thinking of it for a poorly paid position like this, what about all the money your parents have spent on your education.

Never mind I had failed two subjects. She might have framed I think in retrospect a creative response. I wonder if she knew about the shortage of teachers or agonised over the gender gap.

Yet even when I lived in College in Brisbane with a mixed lot of University under-grad and post-grad women, socialised with other Varsity colleges I heard not a whisper. Among my friends in College our female conversation was homesickness and for entertainment boys or poetry or with those inclined their love for girls and poetry. The balance was the Vietnam War and conscription.

 

Aside, I did learn from a Medical student the names of bones of the human body I selected out of a skeleton box and held out to her for instruction. A cartoon glued to the top featured Snoopy lying on his back on the roof of his kennel dreaming of bones, the caption how apt that happiness is having a few bones stashed away.

I applied cold call to the Cairns city library. The Manager librarian attempted a case to its administrators to employ me, although no position was designated, she warm, empathetic, admiring and expressing later the strength of her regret she failed, how strongly she was drawn to my working with her. I would have been happy in a childhood habitat and working with her.

I had run out of time. I farewelled my parents at the airport insisting my father not pay for me to repeat my University year and that I was happy to go to Townsville TTC.

I had to first find housing in a city I had no knowledge of and booked myself into a room at the People’s Palace.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

Did she say bones…

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 7

21 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, matriculation, sociology

Here’s my beach house being built, took ’em ages.

 

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 7

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

Anybody who has tried to hold down a job without a place to live will know housing is basic.

I am the pin in my essay. My bias includes gender and culture as considerations. Who I am in my skin and how I inter-connect as an individual is as basic as a place to call home.

Culture informs us or sets rock solid like concrete around us, describes taboos and great expectations.

What decisions I made in New Zealand in 1987 when I am then unemployed and homeless can only be interpreted with more data. My early interests and personal history are relevant, how I was housed, what my employment experience was, what qualifications did I have to find employment.

…

I helped out in the library filing index cards when I was a young child growing up in a sugar town in North Queensland. I was always there by bicycle or on foot I liked the library and the librarian so much. I just did the job I was offered and I earned 20 cents a session of filing.

Everybody I knew studied something.

People were in never ending supply. People was the most of anything available to me to study without pocket money.

No pocket money.

My father who I mention a lot was my role model. I spent a lot of time with him at the sugar experiment station where he worked, In his glass house set in basins of water on concrete stumps, he had rows of shoe boxes with soil in them and insects in the soil. He showed me the insects were at various stages of their life cycles. My take away thought was he studied on the cheap using shoe boxes. I got it that he told me he was not flush with research money. Me either.

He told me too he would be nobody without amateur entomologists who wrote to him. He was grateful for them They informed his work.

I became an amateur people studier. It might come in handy for someone one day. I sat in a roughly triangular space between the wall and the back

That’s me behind the couch

of the lounge couch. Nobody knew I was there. I eavesdropped. I learned the first principle of scientific study. Do not put yourself in the way of the experiment.

I got over eavesdropping. I got too big to fit in the space. Next I was soon the only one of the children at home, seven years younger than my sister, 11 younger than my next brother and 13 younger than my older brother. Children leaving home was the norm. They left to get qualifications, to work and so on. They went thousands of miles away. They married and had children. My mother grieved that separation, my father more matter of fact. When he was 15, although city bred and qualifying from High School early because his mother was a teacher, he wanted to be a farmer and was apprenticed to a farm in the Scottish Highlands. He immigrated to Australia in 1922 travelling on his own a few months ahead of his parents and siblings, age 17.

Immigration was the norm. My mother’s parents were respectively from Cornwall and Scotland. Their parents immigrated to Australia.

I was called on when I was a young teenager to tutor younger children in piano. A once High School student from my class recalls to me on Facebook I tutored her in missed school work and how much she appreciates my help. A young child asked me was I going to be a school

This story is so true

teacher at the end of my helping him with his homework. We were sitting at a table on a convent verandah waiting for our music lessons. He triggered me into thinking on it.

No, I had no ambitions to be a school teacher. I was just helping.

When I started High School, I found a passion. I wanted to be a nuclear physicist.

Good luck my father and I attended an exhibition toured by the Atomic Energy Commission. I was treated with lavish attention by the staff. I was bedazzled by curiosity. I identified with hearing the son of my father’s labourer was a nuclear physicist. What a coincidence.

My physics class was three academic stream girls with a handful of academic boys and in all, perhaps, 30 students. I was home from school ill with something terrible. My mother asked for me could I have the first physics exam paper to sit it at home, specified not for class credit. I was happy. I was awarded 98%. The teacher announced I topped the class. I felt alarmed and as I anticipated, some tech training and academic stream boys muttered I had cheated and lodged a protest. The teacher rejected their protest, disappointing. I was for justice.

Not because I tried harder, but because I was competent I was awarded 100% for the next exam I sat with the class in the classroom. The teacher glowed for me. I must have cheated upped a notch.

I suggested at some stage soon to the teacher the text book illustration and explanation of the structure of the atom were simplistic. The text

Atoms under the microscope

was written in a way I thought suggested what was shown was it. I am sure it was. I asked about mesons that were not discussed. He replied in a measured tone if we stuck to the textbook it was all we needed to know and we would pass the State exam in a year and half. He said that was all that mattered.

See what he did there.

I was shocked. I was d i s g u s t e d.

Boredom set in. Not that I had ever tried to top the class, I fell a few places. I was mocked by the same boys that clearly I had not been able to cheat.

My physics results spiralled so low over two years, I scraped through the 1965 Junior High School Queensland-wide Physics examination. I did not continue with Physcis.

Part of me tries to remain indifferent to the irony of learning recently the 1967 Senior Physics examination that as a consequence I did not sit to matriculate in Physics two years later provoked a State-wide controversy so uproarious, its reputation passed into the history of Queensland education as too difficult, that it was set at too high a standard.

To matriculate in 1967 to go on to University, 22 points were requisite and five subjects (English added on as compulsory made six). Points

Shoe receives her matric

awarded each subject as merit were 1 to 7 where 7 is the highest and 4 a pass. I understood the intention of the grading was to facilitate at a glance whether a student may have achieved say 3, but not passed compulsory English and could be awarded a concession to be considered for admission into an apprenticeship or get a job.

I matriculated with 28 points, four above what was requisite, on the strength of the four subjects, English, History, Geography and Economics. I achieved the requisite number of 4 points and above for each of three further subjects Chemistry, French and Music so matriculated with seven subjects including English instead of six, a total of 41 points. I have tried to wrap my head around what this and results like it from my class and other schools did to analysis of the 1967 Matriculation result State-wide (presented further below). My own points number in crude statistical form was almost two students’ requisite number to matriculate.

However, not only did I have no Physics. No Maths.

My father was enraged two years before when I arrived home from school with news I accepted enrolment in Economics instead of Maths fait accompli.

He was powerless.

How dare a teacher put this to you and allow you to drop Maths without asking you to discuss it with me first and your mother.

I agree. I am reinforced by reading historical documents that throw further light on my experience of education in the 60s. The potential for

A good education

corruption of an Education Department can be taken for granted as equally as we take for granted its potential lurks in any other arm of government.

It seems extraordinary a teacher appointed as Principal to a new local school, especially when he was himself the prospective Senior Maths teacher, introduce to a High School student the potential she can and advise her to throw in the towel on Maths allegedly on her behalf without wider consultation beyond a half hour discussion with her in his office.

I was a naive 15-year old provided no career advice. Neither did my adviser gather my history. He was not my Maths teacher either for long enough to base his decision on personal experience of me. That he did not consult with my parents and suggest they secure a tutor for me if he thought I would not manage Senior Maths looks like an agenda.

The school was new. Economics was newly offered in place of Maths. The school wanted Economics students. The Queensland Government I suspect wanted Economics students. It might have seemed clear to the Principal I would walk it in. My brother, irony, was a Finance Editor on the desk of a major city’s daily newspaper and held an Economics Degree. One of his closest friends from his school days was an Economist.

Why still would an educator not seek to equip with Maths a teenage student with a background like it and an academic record like mine were it examined?

Shoe’s mother

My mother an Australian bush kid who learned shop calculation using an abacus in the employment of a Chinese emporium, my father at the top of his profession in the context of practical application of the science of entomology, what would a teacher who did know of my family expect their response would be to learning I had been streamed out of Maths?

My brother advised my parents to send me to boarding school in Brisbane where our father’s sister was a teacher. I refused point blank on the basis of loyalty to my parents because I was the remaining child and feared the loss of my parents. That my aunt who never married and I had the same name was a factor although I did not say so. I feared I would be bullied.

The Principal who advised me I was wary of when I met him. Good enough reason in the first place a teenage girl glibly chooses to accept not undertaking Maths that she does not like. Instinct is a powerful driver.

My opinion of him includes eventual belief at the end of that year he did not like me.

He triggered detestation in me. I never spoke about it. I have no memory of him in my final year of High School.

The occasion was my winning the High School inaugural Public Speaking comp.

I was a successful public speaker for 6 years. I learned the skill in far wider fields than the High School. My Economics teacher who was my

No wonder Shoe won all competitions

mentor in regard to public speaking talked me out of qualms I felt about competing in the event. I told him I thought other students had little chance against me. Pitting my experience against theirs seemed unfair in the arena of a new and small school.

Talked into entering, my ambition became to present my skills to my school and teachers. No-one had heard me compete which was at night usually at distance from the School.

I had the audience in the palm of my hand. I extended my vocal projection to the back seats and my attention. I was so composed I could appreciate the audience members’ individual admiration. The quiet other than for my delivery was its evidence. The applause was thunderous. I credited to myself I won as I provided thank you to the audience.

Before the result was announced, the Principal rose to his feet and asked to speak. He was not scheduled to speak he demurred. He was moved to speak. He embarked on a meandering delivery that the best person does not always deserve to win.

The ethos of not winning was a mantra at our school that those who do not win are not just valued for their participation. They are important and loved. I was a wholehearted supporter of the viewpoint. I participated in everything. I flailed last the entire length of the pool representing my swimming team. I played basketball I never had and found I could

I prefer cricket actually

probably be good at it were it not for playing A Reserve tennis. I ran cross country despite I was never any chop at running races.

The Principal’s delivery however now took a different turn. His remains the worst address I have heard made in a public forum. He poorly belaboured that … to paraphrase … the incompetent should win because they put themselves out there and gave it their best and the more nervous they are, they should win, the more they struggle, they should win; the person who has put on the best show should not win and how could they not with all the experience behind them and the privilege that weights their likelihood of winning. Competitors with experience that far outstrips the experience of others ought to be excluded from competition, not given an award.

Comparing others with them is not fair, that is what injustice is.

The identification he had invested in, I as equally maturely recognised …. and had never had opportunity before until he drew back his insecure arrow at the adjudicators, competition rules and a silenced audience … was the strong resemblance of his characteristics as a speaker and physically to the student he was praising without naming him. The student was as much victim had he realised what was being said and if I was malicious. I bore my fellow competitor no illwill. I felt instead deeply for him in the competition that he was fearful beginning to end.

I had won recognition for the State side in the State vs Private School argument by winning seven public speaking competitions in a row through my Primary and Secondary school years. My shoulders were never held straighter and my head when I walked through the audience to

Roy and HG hand out the prizes

accept my award. The performance I staged accepting the Principal’s limp hand and mumbled accolade was my win. Other than a victim of his incompetence as a Principal, I was of his values that decried competitive achievement in favour of attainment of a common denominator.

A lowest common denominator only takes hold where competition is removed.

In the next year, my last at High School I was invited with successful public speakers from other schools to deliver a demonstration speech to an adult group establishing a Public Speaking club in Cairns. It was not uncommon I was invited to address adult groups albeit that was not always possible. I was pleased in this case especially to be invited as the founders were an all-women group. I suffered a catastrophic attack of stage fright, made an apology and left the stage having lost both sequence and recall of the topic.

I did not return to competitive public speaking and not either competitive debate for the sake of itself. I once attempted public speaking competition as an adult and withdrew early. I was overwhelmed with a

Feeling down, you never know what’s around the corner

sense of being an impostor. I have when called on enjoyed however skill as a speaker. My motive is never competitive and I developed advanced skills as a communicator and negotiator.

I draw scrupulous attention I had written everything to this juncture and after the quote (further below in italics) some long time before I read in recent days a retrospective history of Assessment in Secondary Schools by Eddie Clarke published in 1987.

Clarke describes a report prepared in 1970 for the Queensland Board of Secondary School Studies that recommended the Junior and Senior examinations be abolished.

I select two sentences: “The Junior Examination discourages experiment and innovation” and “We have concluded the responsibility should be placed on the schools for the assessment of school achievement.”

I strongly do not agree. I hold a strong viewpoint the school was not the appropriate location of my own best assessment and that schools in a wider general were neither going to be the best location given the slip shod quality of their management in the 1960s and 1970s by the Queensland Education Department. I decry the two reccomendations as the very breath of naivety for the following reasons.

People and not examinations … aside horses for courses and that examinations can be modified … discourage or encourage “experiment and innovation”. I was situate in the frame of a distressed education system in 1969 that I myself did not understand was distressed, but was led by polemicists and dissidents themselves within it to believe was a

Education is a wonderful thing

new and exciting, shiny system. Teachers are crucial and their management. Never in the context of my Physics class did I seek to compete or provide interruption that was careless or nuisance value. Injustice was done me in Physics alone that I contributed significant input and opportunity to the standard of the education received in the Physics class.

If anybody threw in their bundle following my lead, I hope it was the bullies who were never to my knowledge hauled away to describe why they bullied me. Charging me repeatedly that I cheated went deep. We were small children together through Primary School. Furthermore most of the boys I believe went on to apprenticeships and I am pleased for them worked their way through their levels of competency to establish successful careers and higher qualification. I am confident I was not in their imaginations leering at them accusing them of cheating.

I provided as well significant continuous input into the final year of Senior English class taking a lead that was allowed me because, as example it was said of a small novel of Charles Dickens it was boring agreed to by the teacher. I presented a passionate case it was not boring in the same educative terms my father introduced Dickens to me and inspired me to persist until I got it.

Reading now the history of assessment in secondary schools by Clarke, I read that dominant educators in the period of the 60s seem to have advocated a purge dedicated to dismantling the education system entire, a refixing of educational co-ordinates in the nature of a pogrom,

An early pic of Clarke

appealing only to a common denominator and I suspect justice its first victim. I note blame for the allegedly parlous condition of High School examination success rates was attributed to University lecturers’ management of examination setting.

I note claims made by the Bassett Report (August ’68) about the status of my matriculation year of ’67 was the basis of the reccommendations.

More than half failed to qualify for enrolment in the degree course aimed at?

Only 50.6% of Queensland’s Senior year students matriculated?

Add sub-seniors, that is the previous year’s students, and 45% only of the total number of students obtained minimum requirements for matriculation?

All students have who stayed on beyond Junior examination year is a record of failure?

I suspect the document was the work of blokes driven by ideology analysing statistics compiled by blokes driven by ideology talking about young blokes not yet driven by ideology who they identified with and truly felt for regards the young blokes needing explanations provided why they failed and the teachers, too, needing cover.

If the interpretations of the Basset Report were worth a cracker, I name regardless the notable absence of reference to the quality of teaching and teacher training.

Young blokes the Report isolates, poor kids and I will be among the first to agree with that, needed an education plan that facilitated their matriculation into apprenticeships. To extrapolate further, considering the interconnected-ness of education and experiential politics the slant given the report would meet favour with the Government that it was the

Qld Uni

University lecturer’s fault and as well caters to an undeniable fact we would have needed more and more apprentices of the age because we were conscipting our qualified to the Vietnam War. A report generated by educators within the framework of the Queensland Department of Education or its Committees was not going to breathe air too long if the analysts did not walk a nice political line of bias between the sociology of education and the sociology of workplace.

Queensland was a rough place for anybody who stepped out of line in the 60s.

The Committee’s report (The Bassett Report)…stated that:

Present senior examinations are too hard for a significant proportion of students who at present stay on at school beyond Junior. At the completion of their secondary schooling all these students have is a record of failure. This with the results of 7595 students who sat for five Senior subjects in 1967. Of these only 50.6 per cent matriculated, matriculation being defined as the gaining of a point score of 22 in five subjects, (a minimum of 4 in each) English being a compulsory subject…

When the result is reduced to a total of 20 points to include those qualifying for entrance to the Institute of Technology and the Teachers’ Colleges, the percentage rises to 65.6. Hence it appears certain that more than one-third of the 1967 Senior candidates failed to obtain any qualification and that considerably more than one-half failed to qualify for enrolment in the degree course aimed at.

If the sub-senior year is taken as a starting point, the failure rate is higher still… of the 8456 who began sub-senior in 1966, approximately 45 per cent only obtained minimum requirements for matriculation in 1967…

In a situation in which a significant and increasing number of students are staying on to the completion of the secondary school without qualifying to enter a tertiary institution (and perhaps without wishing to do so), there is a definite need for a different provision for them.

At present the Senior examination has to serve them, and also those proceeding for further study. In attempting to do both of these tasks it falls between the two, not serving either as well as it might.

……

Reflecting on my entry into Grade 11 in 1966, I knew where I was in this respect alone. I knew times had changed and that the year was not called sub-senior any longer but titled Grade 11. We all knew and never referred to our year as sub-senior, nobody did. We accepted the year was

Some of my Grade 11 class mates

Grade 11. We knew accepting it was a significant ideological shift. Sub-senior as a title was demeaning. Grade 11 opened opportunity instead for the psychology of achievement to burgeon. Sub-senior was exactly what it says, hierarchical and not wanted, sub-.

Yet educators were beavering in the background preparing reports and papers still referring to the year as sub-senior?

Did they apparently not get where the education system had arrived and value the intrinsic importance of language and that what we call adminstrative function shapes it or were they purposefully ignoring the work of those who before them made sub-senior archaic?

I cannot think they were competent.

Our very own intelligentsia that was resident in our entire year of ’67 could have advised. We co-operated between ourselves and managed even a significant coup regards one issue to establish the conditions we collectively required. I was designated by the group spokesperson to advance our cause. We discussed, debated and we worked hard. We each had things going on in our individual backgrounds. We came together

Our mentor

each day and survived two significant years of education that were entirely bullying-free regards the relationships with other students as I experienced them. Somewhere, scattered in various parts of the world are successful individuals whether they passed all their subjects or failed by virtue of the system or not who feel strong ties of affection and admiration for me as a participant as I do them unreservedly. We changed horses later, we changed courses. There are teachers and consultants among them.

I was happy in the companionship of my peers. My sociology of a place to call home pin points those two years as home.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

 

I feel touched by this story

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 5

01 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, homelessness, rental

Geeps I’m hungry

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 5

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

A home is more than a house.

Rogernomics is the economic rationalist theory and policy named for the Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas. Not everybody shares my view Rogernomics created a tidal wave of poverty and displacement of people who were the most vulnerable from their homes.With them went their poor neighbourhoods where the living was already straitened by low incomes and welfare payments. Reports of penury affecting the isolated and vulnerable Maori communities in the north of the North Island escalated rapidly into tragic reports of dire and deadly consequences. Health and medical practices and small stores closed their doors.

One of the greatest impacts on New Zealand was the removal of protectionism core to New Zealand’s being able to sustain its manufacturing industry that otherwise could only be destroyed

Yeah, vote labour

by flooding an economy with goods made in labour markets where wages were a relative pittance. Destroyed they were. The significant clothing industry that provided New Zealand considerable prestige went offshore. Economists will point to the reduction in the national debt and alternative industry growth.

The finance market was deregulated. The New Zealand dollar was floated. Australian money did not convert as a given as ours had with, untold here, more New Zealand dollars than Australian. I cannot believe when I reflect on it the percentage in my memory is real, formerly ours to pocket. Newspaper reports lauded the growth of the finance industry and its heroes who were the infamous yuppies. New Zealand was the first stock market in the world to open and, I was to later learn at first hand, did breathing an optimism not shared by sceptics.

A country is more than the sum of its economic parts.

Health care costs soared in the 80s when a user-pays principle was introduced and again the qualitative line between health and illness that includes the concept of health care and a government that is humane crumbled. I was hard hit by it. My closest neighborhood friend has told me in very recent years when I

It’s my neighborhood and I’ll cry if I want to

returned to New Zealand for a visit I disappeared from her ken. I had no concept I did desperate in the ensuing struggle for an income and a living becoming sparer and sparer as inflation as well that soared in the 70s drove prices for utilities through the roof, add the sale of public sector facilities and add the impact of GST.

On the most immediate plane of my concerns, I wanted to return myself and the children to Australia. Every advisor demanded I follow through and remove us but without providing proper advice. My self confidence was critically low so I was unsure how to. My husband’s distress without a question was manifest in regard to separation. I faced as well the double standard of discrimination that the lawyer who was responsible for managing the detail of our buying the house automatically absorbed him as a client to manage the detail of the sale of the house and as well the intimate details of his separation. I telephoned the lawyer, which was one of my first renewed moves to establish dignity. He who had been such a gentleman I admired was no longer the man I had thought so very highly of when we met. He persisted in his attempt to reject me and my call. I persisted that the complexity was I faced potential dealings with his office result of the issue of the ownership and sale of the house. In an impassioned frame of mind, I assured him his excluding me from his office because he had blatantly absorbed my husband’s take on the issue of our separation as if it was a verifiable fact in law and moral fact did not change the blatant discrepancy. I had been denied equity and ease of access to that office. I blurted to him I was devastated by the way I was received on the phone and how highly I had thought of him.

That changed nothing in his demeanor. I drew a breath and provided a rapid fire and unmistakable true-heart account of the way I was living from the date of my announcing I was

Hubby

separating from my hubby who I tried to live with for a period from the date of my announcing I was separating from him. The quality of life for six weeks and content of what was said to me regardless I met it with the patience of a martyr was killing me by rising degrees. That the cost of the kitchen was a factor was wrecking in its effect on me. I was to look at the hinges of the cupboard doors that they were displaced and going to fall off. Look at them. Look at them. The finish in the kitchen was abysmal. I was a joke. When his colleagues asked him how my writing was coming on, he said he cringed … cringed he repeated … in embarrassment.

I had an affair during my visit in Australia that was not the reason for the end of our marriage, but a symptom. In retrospect I cannot imagine any other outcome. The subject of it was an occasional reference of my husband’s instead focussed on reciting every evening on his return from work a litany of crimes I committed that were specious relative to the value I

Shoe goes the leather look

invested into our lives. Nothing I had ever been or done that was successful was attributable to me, but to him. I was nothing he raged without him.

Some of the consequence of separation of our marriage arrangement was catastrophic on him I was left in no doubt. In the same period I learned as much as anybody could about the mental ill health of domestic violence. I secured insights into my own behaviour towards his compromised position with a large family of children in previous years and to my confusion were not referred to, my heart breaking as his rancor grew, I processed, increasing attempt to exercise tolerance of his distress. I internalised and thought.

I stayed far beyond my use-by date and withhold details I believe it is unlikely he has repeated in another relationship, more especially his circumstances changed. His new partner was a medical professional and advanced her qualifications becoming highly qualified. I wrote a letter to him before our separation when he traveled away for a conference and the reason he did not acknowledge it he told me was it was boring. I have no doubt an account of weeding an entire property in preparation for his return and I imagined enjoyment is boring by comparison with in future inhabiting a medical professional’s ideal world in companionship with a medical professional earning an income before having two more children.

The lawyer was quiet at the other end of the phone. He was listening and taking on board the desperate current then circumstance. I blamed nobody. I was telling the story. I arrived at the final word and broke down in a wave of exhaustion and

Shoes Cricket XI

traumatised tears. I rarely cry until I sob. Another irony of my experience was the lawyer’s response likely saved me from what surely was imminent collapse, my life. His tone of voice was unmistakably kind and accepting of me, the human. He soothed me out of a deep font of sincerity he was sorry to learn of the family’s troubles. He thanked me for telephoning. He said quietly that if I was able to make myself a cup of tea and sit down with it, he agreed I was on sure ground I saw potential it was an issue of equity. I knew it likely he would advise my husband at least continuing managing the details of other than the sale of the house for both of us on an equal footing was a conflict of interest. I recall my husband coming home and the expression on his face. He asked had I spoken with the lawyer. I cannot recall if I admitted I had, but believed I would have simply said yes. I was thankful I had to deal with not the least further inference of recrimination he had to establish a relationship with a different lawyer’s office.

The first property I rented suitable to house 5 children was hard to find and grotesquely expensive. Electricity costs were soaring due to the removal of subsidies. The policy plan of Rogernomics was a thesis most regrettably, even as government corporations

Me and Shoe

were privatised, that trucked in all the implementations of change and the dismantling of what was a functional social welfare state.

Combine the increasing difficulties I did not foresee with the discrimination I experienced in an age no-one spoke of domestic violence least named it.

Before I left the marital property with the children the first time, the children and I went to see a medical professional who became agitated when the children and I were grouped in his surgery where I described the acute level of distress the family was suffering. As a consequence I developed a terror of medical presentation for any reason when he looked at me entirely confused and rejected my being there by the pronouncement I recognise in light of experience as shocked confusion, “What if your husband comes to see me and tells me a different story.”

I was too intimidated to pronounce the error what did it matter if my husband attended and told him a different story. Were that to eventuate, it was a medical practitioner well advised he was obliged to treat a family in a circumstance of serious breakdown with a raft of social problems including penury it had added to the woes of travail for a country in deepening crisis. The same

The hospital staff

diversionary outcome was a later result of attending to a hospital having persuaded one of the older children she attend with me willing to describe a drug and alcohol problem. The attending practitioner’s eyes blazed as he drew his enormous frame and bulk up to judicial height over her to chastise we could not have you young people behaving like this.

I had gone in the period of separation with the children to a women’s shelter so crowded we lay across beds to sleep to fit all the women and children escaping domestic violence rising as the disease it is does in any circumstance of mental health distress, no one can tell me not exponentially in circumstances of the deepest poverty and mental deprivation. Passing a mirror I saw a skeletal frame and a woman with eyes that were so large I saw they were paralysed in a stare of fear. I had not recognised myself.

I sat down in my first ever group of women sharing their experiences as functioning barely as anything but unpaid domestics and by chance I was seated at the furthest end of a

The women’s group

semi-circle from where the first woman introduced herself and a sense of her despair.

Out of a direct quote from online: in 1984 20,000 women and children in New Zealand sought help from one of…34 refuges.

Each woman in the circle where I was no longer alone in 1986 told a story of living with a sense of extreme deprivation because of the poverty of her home and its cultural or religious mores or because of fatigue, social pressures, isolation. I was normalised. I was safe. Only in a much later retrospect did I recognise I felt safe for the racial diversity and that a larger number were Polynesian women who were immigrants. When it came to my turn, the facilitator announced to me by way of opening my presentation that of course, I was married to —— and I would not understand the experiences of the women who spoke before me, that for example I lived in comfort. I quietly described myself without rancor including the wind howling through the gaps in the structure of the house on the side of a hill and my isolation as a migrant woman with a large family, the hours I had worked, what I had invested and learned. That a social worker could deliver and direct such a crude assumption by way of a summary judgement at anyone who was a client they did not know but who looked as broken as I did would only defeat me still if I was not the experienced ageing woman I now am.

The effect however was I found myself painfully shy with the women on an individual basis. I was relieved for myself as equally for the children my husband’s lawyer persuaded mine

I like sausages…

my husband would leave what was still at that difficult stage of the issue of housing the marital home so I could remove the children from the shelter and live in the house alone with them. My husband’s anxiety communicated through the lawyers was fear for the children they would be exposed to and contract any one of a multiplicity of childhood contagions that incidence of was rising in New Zealand at an alarming rate, especially the result of overcrowded housing.

The first property I rented suitable to house 5 children was hard to find and grotesquely expensive. Electricity costs were soaring due to the removal of subsidies. The policy plan of Rogernomics was a thesis most regrettably, even as government corporations were privatised, that trucked in all the implementations of change and the dismantling of what was a functional social welfare state.

The social welfare system shut down and excluded me because I had said I intended to return to live in Australia. I was refused an income as a supporting mother of five children. The Australian government at its inner city office refused me consideration citing the New Zealand Government responsible

A girl from NZ

as long as I was resident in New Zealand. My status as the wife of a professional whose place of employment had paid all the expenses of family relocation to New Zealand and it appeared on paper generous support on entry attracted to me discrimination. For many months I went by way of a lone and long bus journey into the city to stand in an unemployment cue to secure a government payment of the dole it was deemed by the New Zealand government I was allowed.

I witnessed violent and desperate scenes in the Department of Social Welfare result of people suffering blatant hunger they described in dramatic outbursts of anger. I recall myself angry and frustrated, hungry and deriding the behaviour of a counter clerk rejecting my attempt at application, telling me to come back in a following week to apply again for payment. You stood

The Far Queue

in a queue until you were issued a number and called and processed. You were issued a cheque you took to a designated bank and cashed so nothing was convenient and you carried money you had to guard with your life. A woman whose obscure original nationality confused me she was employed in the position she was while I begged for considerations for the children like clockwork was eventually assigned to me as a case manager. Her sense of superiority frustrated me like a sword. I had to endure her as one might a blank wall until I realised her name was perfect for caricature, For the only time in my life I have I took to addressing her by the caricature, hesitating, and correcting myself before I proceeded with my repeated application.

I attended her office and asked for a Statutory Declaration form. I announced I had come to advise I did not intend to return to Australia. She snapped, “You can’t do that!” “I retorted I just had and for her to now provide me a Stat Dec.

However, I was not awarded a Supporting Mother’s payment for a very long further time. Among other experiences that were rough particularly on the children I received a letter in due course telling me that when my youngest turned 5 years of age I was obliged to find employment. I was back otherwsie on the dole.

The children emerging from the shelter and post-experience of unhappy parents had to be persuaded to go back to school. The education system was suffering increasing stress that was critical for impoverished sole parents struggling with high costs of living and children run amok who were poorly supervised. I

Soul food

was struggling with behaviour I found intolerable my husband brought with him into my life from erratic time to time and a legal set of commitments that were harrowing. I found myself increasingly better educated in ways I had not foreseen and one of those was I witnessed work done by sophisticated practitioners of the law that was terrible, cunning, mediocre, good, excellent and incomparable.

I began to seek every avenue in which I could be a client of any department to observe and learn the skills of presentation and negotiation through lived experience. I sought groups and associations where I could witness family interventions. I read books on the ills that beset us. I was developing advanced knowledge of crisis management. The tertiary studies I had done had provided me opportunity to understand the lived experience of being hurled into the formalities of separation when children are involved.

I began to understand and find myself. I held considerably higher qualifications as result of education and experience than the situation I was described by. When I changed my own lawyer I had the unusual experience of seeing in one office a group of lawyers swell in size keen to try to establish between

You have the right to be guilty

themselves in discussion and argument I could attend their offices as a client whereas they identified my husband had been for a short while a client. I would normally be excluded. Their eventual decision they could not offer me a place provided me a growth of self worth especially witness to the sincerity of their apology and regret. That I was sought for my skills in presentation and I have no doubt dignity restored me that I was confident to direct and beg the office of the lawyers I finally settled with to agree in accordance to whatever path would effect a final financial separation as stress free and immediate as possible.

They agreed without protest I would pay for items however trivial or menial in their perception a listed expectation was, that meant tools of domestic use I had bought in opportunity shops at retail value, half a sewing machine that was second hand and years old that was valued by my husband’s lawyers at the highest potential retail value, the children’s beds that were given to us when we were first in New Zealand out of a discarded pile leaning up against the external wall of an auction room.

I slept on a blanket on a floor and became accustomed to it.

Housing was the primary issue and establishing a normalcy.

Normalcy was a struggle and I made innumerable mistakes I would not repeat. I was started on a learning curve.

I was appointed to my first full-time position in 1987 at the age of 37. Irony it was 1987 and I stepped after a few months in my first position into the high powered and stressful world of the deregulated finance industry. I found myself capable and equal to the demands of work in both high powered environments. The market was volatile and unstable where added to my responsibilities was a client base that was substantial and vulnerable. Having studied Economics at High School stood me

East West High School

in stead for the study I had to accomplish next. My knowledge of human behaviour was a factor in market analysis that was confident. I was considering scheduling to sit broker exams.

We were especially a family unaccustomed to my long absences from home. I was working critically long hours. Home circumstances were chaotic. One night walking to the bus through deserted city streets I realised the children were neglected and my health was deteriorating. I volunteered the care of the two younger and small children to their father.

In the interim I fell into rent dispute with the landlord of the second rental property I moved the family too that was Local Council housing.

My subsequent experience was of a roller coaster as the finance industry bucked and bolted and crashed before the end of the year even as the daily paper I had worked for dismantled its manual methods of production and discarded staff in favour of the innovation of digital technology.

Choosing to illustrate families break down and that their circumstances unstable to begin with are circumscribed by the quality and affordability of their housing I have found the chronology out of sync in places and gaps in the story that is personal history only because there is an emotional enormity attached to the task of recreating a period of social history as lived experience.

Choosing to include insight into the end of my marriage is a result of the work of Rosie Batty, champion and advocate of the imperative we attend to domestic violence in whatever form it evidences in Australia.

In 1987 I joined the ranks of homeless.

To finish Part 4, I quote from online New Zealand History (Nga korera ipurangi o Aotearoa) out of a chapter titled ‘The 80s’ and as well some contemporary figures on housing in New Zealand.

By the end of the decade there was a net annual outflow of more than 30,000 with nearly 60% of all Kiwis moving overseas, included many young Māori, heading for Australia.

It is thought in New Zealand today there are 24,000 homeless in Auckland. In 2016 the population of Auckland was 33.4% of New Zealand’s population. Auckland is the destination of local migrants and incoming. Regards a demographic of population density, understand 70% of Auckland is rural and 90% of Aucklanders are urbanites. Population density is 1,210 people per square kilometre.

The rise of rents in particularly Auckland since 2013 where it was said in a news item recently the base rents start around $500 … and I have said of my experience in 1986 rents were astronomic … suggests the number of homeless in New Zealand must be on a dramatic rise well in excess of the statistic in 2013 (published 2017) 1 in 100 New Zealanders was homeless.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

My hero

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 4

31 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, home, homelessness, rental

Where ever I lay my hat that’s my home

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 4

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

In 1984, 15,771 persons whose last country of residence was Australia migrated to New Zealand. 14,097 persons went to Australia. Gain to New Zealand: 1,604.

In 1985, 12,537 persons resident in Australia migrated to New Zealand, 3, 234 less than in 1984. 21,964 persons went from New Zealand to Australia. Loss from New Zealand: 9,427

Statistics can be made to say and do anything they say. Tell them to bark and they roll over. I don’t think so when they are blatant..

In 1986, 22,578 more people left New Zealand and went to Australia than moved to New Zealand from Australia.

The drain of residents from New Zealand because they went to Australia was a blow-out.

I did not know those statistics in 1984, 1985 and 1986 that were the first three years I lived in New Zealand. I do know the white colonialist factor.

The elephant is in the room. I am harsh and believe me, I love this country with

Country passion

passion because sometimes, we end up loving the place where we have experienced hell.

Where a predominance of migrants into a local environment are not English speaking or are a race and colour other than white, a white female migrant is overlooked by a white administration if she succumbs by virtue of the same experience to unattended ills or is subject to deprivation and abuse. A society that is breaking down isolates a migrant white woman as surely as any other.

I just yearned at community events and picnic places for our family to belong to large and boisterous groupings of Pacific Island migrants. With the emotional problems of an isolated woman who was a migrant with a large family of children and no immediate family to seek haven, of course I identified with migrants with large families.

I felt little shared identity with loose groupings of white New Zealanders at that time. I heard their accent as gutting. The national newsreader pronounced days of the

Tell me why I hate Mondee

week as Mondee, Tuesdee etc. I misunderstood in face-to-face transactions the simplest words.

How long is a piece of string.

The reception party we were told to anticipate was long in the making. When it was we drove to a remote location I viewed over violent tree tops buffeted by a gale and nothing else in sight. A sign on the door of its bach warning to not steal or take our things they mean a lot to us transfixed me. I felt overwhelmed. I had never seen a sign like it on a door of housing that is a home. I looked to incoming new staff members who were like us finding their feet. I asked the wife of a recently arrived professional who had a job in his same department or building how it had come about and she replied ‘Nepotism’.

A blusterer of a huge man asked me where I was standing alone at a buffet table what it was like where I came from and I would not be used to the rain. I said thinking to please that where I am from it’s very wet so I’m used to rain, I like rain. He chortled, snorted, abrasive, “No, it’s NOT. Australia’s a dry country!”

No matter perhaps he considered himself a statistical genius and humorist. No matter his judgement how to behave towards a pleasant woman might have been affected by alcohol. The impact was crushing isolation in that space. He delivered his retort and stalked away.

Robin the Hood

In a round robin of what everybody did conducted in a circle on the brilliant green lawn, I was the one guest without professional employment outside the home. There was an awkward silence that caught me off guard and maybe it was mine.

Guests were introduced by description of what institution they worked for and the hostess was confused how to introduce me. I was relieved to see one of the identifiable good guys I had previously met. She took me under wing I rarely left from under. We were ushered by the hostess to be seated beside a picture window, which was now I realised the bach seemed to be built on an edge of a cliff top albeit that may have been illusion. I hate heights. The room spun as I sat down and refused an attempt by the husband of the hostess to force me to stand up and sit at the window to see the

Our hostess for the evening

beautiful view. Yes, lovely view I said from where I was and wrote a short story about it later in which I announced my hypocrisy complete.

The view was bleak and of waves as violent as the trees in the valley smashing against a point as if it the long tongue of a living beast. A violent sea was spraying into the air.

Children rolled on a section of dark green lawn that had a steep incline and my children fitted in. That could have been enough.

My thoughts instead were meshing with the complexities of racial distress experienced by one of the central characters in the novel, Light in August by William Faulkner. I read Light in August when I was at High School and Joe Christmas, an orphan was born with white skin in the Deep South of the American States, but believes he has black African forebears. He fitted nowhere as a result of his identity he imagined otherwise he had none seeking black associations that rejected his cloy and maladjusted in white association.

I witness I saw evidence of racism in spades where we lived in our suburb.

Most distressing it was common to hear young white men call out abuse directed at aging Polynesian women driving small sedans laden with produce from the markets. I knew racist Australia. My growth to understanding this new racism caused me feelings of the greatest rage and shame. I have experienced now widely the primary trait of a white male anywhere who is a bully to repeatedly round on lone women and cause harm by whatever means they can capitalise.

As devastating, white and black kids spat globules of mucous onto streets and pavements. When later the older two children began to hawk with gusto onto street

A Hawks fan looking at his latest HIV test

pavements out walking with friends they made who hawked too, my skin crawled.

I was suffering catastrophe is the best word.

In the day to day management of the family I was a key to provision. I knocked on neighbour’s doors to introduce myself where I saw a vegetable garden in a back yard. The supplement was necessity to a diet of rice, potatoes and as many varieties of bread that can be imagined as I was proficient at baking bread. My husband’s income status was a junior ladder rung. We had not expected it. He relied on verbal discussion. He was now promised he would advance when he had completed a year’s Diploma in the area of Community Health.

I was incredulous. I understood why he gave not a thought his level of income would not be on a higher rung.

His projected Diploma he knew nothing of previous to signing his contract of employment complemented six years of medical study, two further as an intern of which one was spent in his city’s hospital and the second in a markedly different city, a further few intensive months as a locum public hospital Registrar in a remote location and the only medical professional for miles around, one year of specialty in a public hospital to get experience with anesthetics regard to children and his intention

Yes, it’s simple tooth extraction

was to stand him in stead in remote locations, followed by a protracted Ph. D. He had been a supervisor of Masters students, an invitee to present a paper to an international conference in Edinburgh, Scotland and as well presented papers variously at conferences in Australia. As well as his Ph.D he had studies in statistics through successive units in economic statistics. His extra curricular activity included a position years long as an activist lobbying the Australian government to take a role encouraging smoking cessation. He was a locum doctor the duration of the length of his Ph. D. He had experience of day locums in their surgeries for general practitioners in need of a stand-in.

All of the foregoing has to suggest something to an administrative body before it transports a family of seven from one country to the other on the basis of a verbal discussion at a conference in Sydney when it was said there was not much time given to it.

I condemn the areas of usury by which research scientists are exploited. I understand the usury as lived experience.

I was alarmed in advance. Before we left Australia I received a letter of welcome that was an invitation to join the staff wives club. I did not identify as a feminist per se regardless my feelings of shock were immediate and I threw the letter down, murmured what sort of place is this I am going to?

In the study of the geography of health, place and space it is said: we are where we live. Emphasis for the purpose of establishing a health research plan is removed from what we eat. We eat, instead where we are. The factors considered are as examples

2,4,6,8 tuck in don’t wait

food transport to place, what are the food miles to place, where is our housing in the place, what sort of facilities and utilities do we have in our homes specific to place, who else is dependent on that place and how many, so on limitless including the topography of place. I would add only we are who we can be where we are.

Disconcerting that when we mooted going to New Zealand, we had options, other places to consider, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, a potential was the UK, another was to change course albeit that was not a seriously considered option. Our plans included I had, unabashed expected I was the centre of attention to further my qualifications to a level commensurate with the number of children in the family, my years, my need to make social contribution, well educated, entirely over dependence on one income, entirely over not having one.

Personal complications set in not least of which were trenchant post-traumatic stress and emotional issues that were an onslaught. My husband and I who with our family of children had suffered some of the loveliest moments when we met and shared them with three children and then five separated in circumstances that were ghoulish.

I initiated our separation in 1986 on my return from travel to Australia where I assisted my aged father to dismantle his sister’s estate. Grieving the death of my Aunt as an added burden, I felt the loss keenly. Reflecting back on her, I had resolved

Uncle Aunty

in the time since moving to New Zealand to spend some dedicated time with her that as a consequence never had. I had wanted to confess myself needing her guidance in view of her 30 year career as a Classics mistress in a private girl’s college.

Her name was the same as mine and she never married. My name was everywhere as I moved in that home of her lifetime lived in Australia. She migrated to Australia with her parents and siblings after her graduation in 1922 from Aberdeen University so held in the house was almost 60 years of her history and extraordinary forethought. She had one drawer for example that was a mindful museum of the history of stockings. She left a complete record of lived experience. No-one had the least idea. I, only, knew the real value of what was lost because the contents of the house were distributed and sold and the property sold, tried to intervene but likely too meek and mild.

My husband and I sold our house on the hill in New Zealand next, the day it was opened for inspection on basis of the kitchen. We had installed a new kitchen. I designed it with the help of a tradesman and worked on it through nights, finishing and preparing surfaces for painting, painting with the tradesman the next day, keeping a roller constantly wet, switching between loading the roller and layering paint to a standard equal to the facilities and design. The parents of the young single man who bought the house asked to visit immediately to see the kitchen. He was a tradesman.

His mother announced to me with a laugh”He’s got a better kitchen that I do.”

I have seen what was my kitchen again when I travelled back to New Zealand 35 years after returning to live in Australia. The same owner, now family with grown

Well who could resist this cook

children, owns it. The kitchen is the same kitchen to its last detail except from in memory a new stove. I have not since seen a durable and smart kitchen like it.

The cost of the kitchen was something else. Remembering the house sold on the day it went on the market we nevertheless recovered the money we paid for the property and raised for improvements inclusive work on the laundry to make it good and waterproof.

I set about finding a rental property for myself and five children. Rents were astronomic. GST was introduced in 1986 at the rate of almost 20%.

1984 however, two years before, is crucial that marked the inception of the brutal period of reform referred to in New Zealand’s economic history as Rogernomics.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

 

This is serious Mark…

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 3

29 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

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Christina Binning Wilson, home, homelessness

I love my home…

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 3

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

The house we bought at the end of the month after we arrived in New Zealand was a weatherboard bungalow on a hillside. The hill fell away beneath it to a steep incline to the street. The partly dugout basement was dirt. The back of the bungalow sat snug at ground level. The front was supported by high stilts

The Hills are alive with the sound of music

boxed in by vertical sheeting painted an olive green. The sheeting had seen better days in places. The main bedroom protruded on the left hand side of the bungalow past a front door that was inaccessible from its verandah. That section of the verandah had been turned into a sleep-out boxed in with fibro walls.

The style of the front wall and windows of the main bedroom was oriel and projected further ahead of a line of sight along the edge of a front verandah. The right hand front of the property

Gib and Angler hang out on the verandah

featured another oriel wall and its windows set in low overlook onto the verandah right hand ‘corner’ and a set of concrete ‘front’ steps seen better days.

The result was eccentric. The frontage of the bungalow was full frontal onto its street and the oriel window and ‘front’ steps faced a street on the right hand side of the property. The bungalow featured forward with its promnent main bedroom and towards the corner of the property as well. The build was on a corner of a road intersection.

Each of the roads was a hill so the fall of the roads below was dramatic.

The base of the ‘front’ concrete steps was a small distance from the side boundary line and elevation fall to the street pavement below it. The fronage and verandah was provided no privacy. Further up the hill there was a gate between the side of the bungalow and the start of a paling fence that followed the entire boundary line to the back fence.

The front verandah at the top of the steps merged with a side verandah to an entrance door into a living room.

The bungalow was a prominent monolith prone to mould with

Two balls are better than iron

scraps of iron lace between verandah posts and no railing on the verandah

Two men with a small excavator removed an amount of dirt from the back yard sufficient to create a flat front yard behind a log retaining wall. We planted grass seed. Every few minutes I ran down a central hallway and yelled out the high-in-the-sky window of the sleep-out scarecrowing away birds after seed.

The distance from our new housing to inner city Auckland was a stretch by car or by bus. My husband’s employment was based in the inner city. We settled in a fashion into 9 to 5. Up to now we had never been 9 to 5, but neither was I as isolated.

I attached in the early days to the literature of New Zealand writers. In the State library later I found descriptions of traditional Maori tribal history and musical instruments drawn in beautiful detail. I early learned not to enquire of newly met acquaintances about Maori culture by way of making

Bloody nice legs

conversation. I was frequently met with suspicion and paranoia embroidered with criticism of Australian racism. A newly met and dearly loved neighbour who herself was Maori snapped when I asked what traditional food Maoris eat “The same as everybody else.”

New Zealand’s education system that separated children from Primary School school for two years preparatory to High School made for different and entire sets of uniforms for two years during which a child might have a growth spurt and require another. The older three children … the younger two under school age … were at the same school in Australia in class rooms in a continuous sequence. The third oldest was now at a Primary School and the two girls at Intermediate in a different direction. With small resources educating five children so we stayed on the right side of our legal obligations … and the children had been out of school with us travelling for an extended time before we left Australia … their schooling took on a nightmare-ish quality I likely derived out of culture shock and alienation.

In the early days one of the children placed a homework

I just love homework

exercise in front of me they had copied from a blackboard. I read that Australian convicts when they were freed were “quite well looked after”, provisioned as they set out yet struggled to manage their selections and their crops failed. Reason was they were from the city and did not know anything about farming. I am unsure the descriptors I wrote in a especially worded kindly I thought note to the teacher about the conditions leading to overcrowded jails and boating convicts to Australia would stand up to my scrutiny now. The detail of the treatise is neither here nor there. If ever I made a victim of a child I did the unsuspecting student who carried the note to school to give to the teacher. My daughter was called out of the classroom and stood to be told to give her a mother a message. The message was verbal. Her teacher as long her mother did not tell her teacher how to run the teacher’s classroom would not tell her mother how to run her house. No

My teacher told me to never trust teachers

child or adult without the mindset could imagine it to make it up. Somewhere at this point although I had not fully arrived, I began to consider the children could sink or swim.

The third youngest never brought home homework from Primary School. The parent-teacher interview at the end of the first term was a shocker. The teacher brimmed with indignation when I enquired why my son had no homework, perhaps it was school policy. He frothed that it was there if he wanted to take it. He set a box out with exercises in it without fail for the children to select homework. He never he stated with an air of rancour directed at my son takes any. I blurted that if he wanted homework done, I had never heard anything as ridiculous and that he give it to the child. The next idiocy I learned from my son at Primary School. The children took turn about to help the teacher in the early morning as road crossing monitor. He rose at the crack of dawn excited and scrubbed up to have his turn for a week. The following week was the same. The next week began the same pattern. I asked him why someone else was not monitor. It transpired no-one else wanted to and as he liked doing it he volunteered. I silently considered day in and out over my dead body.

Smaller issues than the care of the children and their education were starting to break me.

The Principal at the High School when the two girls moved on

My principal had no principles

from Intermediate … and by then I was a single parent and had moved with the children to a rental housing …I first spoke to when he telephoned me at my, by then, workplace. He was almost incoherent. The second girl I realised as he described what the matter was had pulled a variation of a prank she accomplished in her early years at Primary School when she persuaded a set of twins to dress in the other’s clothes and sit in the other’s place in their classroom. That had been a source of mirth. Not this time that she had dressed two girls external to the school in purloined school uniforms to smuggle them onto the school grounds. The garbled description I was provided was the Principal looked out a window and saw a scene inspired by its circulating to other students that a lark was in the air, whereupon they rushed to surround the two girls and a crowd gathered and more, laughing and chattering. The Principal must have seen it as a class action style gathering against him potential, a riot in the grounds and ran downstairs and out onto the grounds … beyond my understanding … at the group that melted. My daughter had turned to see him charging at her and turned on her heel in terror at the sight of him bearing down on her and ran. By some means he knew she was the ring leader or assumed so. She did not stop. When I identified out of his garble she had left the school grounds I asked the Principal

I’m a psycho and don’t known why I’m in this story

where did she go did he know and he so enraged could still barely speak how enraged was he. He was not the least concerned where she went to. I quietly excused myself from the phone, left my workplace as a result to set out to find her. I found her at home where she bolted. Her description of him running at her was fearsome.

She left school shortly after. For some reason a number of male police called at the house and she was home. She had allowed them entry that they requested. She phoned me at work, described what happened. She had not been arrested, but was worrying the police would return and she would be. The situation she briefly described sounded as worrying. I left work and went home. She had been accused of stealing. A parcel of underwear I had bought the day before for myself with her help was lying on a bed still with labels attached. One of the

Hello, hello, hello what is going on ear

policemen had opened it and took out the garments. Each was held up towards her in succession and the items handed each to the next. She was goaded that to effect she had stolen them. She said they were her mother’s and she and I had gone shopping the day before. The goading was protracted and the handling …and what sounded like fondling … of the underwear. She was threatened their return to arrest her and they left. The station desk clerk saw me come in his station’s door no mistaking that I was lit-fused. I asked to see who was in charge. I delivered my story of what I had been told happened and my expectations in one managed breath and left to go home to my daughter.

Meanwhile … still back in the house on the hill as a complete family unit as we were when we arrived in New Zealand …. my other half came home with Prime Minister”Piggy” Muldoon’s classic he heard recited in his staff room that the numbers of Kiwis leaving New Zealand to live in Australia effectively raised the IQ of both countries. I said no statesman would say it. Not only did he, but years later I reflected on it reading a

A 19th century paper

nineteenth century paper on immigration to New Zealand. Its rationale considering policy approach to ‘imbeciles’ as immigrants, say the offspring of immigrants, was the country’s intelligence would fall whereas the level of the intelligence of the country migrated from would rise. Takeaway thought: beware emigration agents from other countries bearing boatloads of ‘imbeciles’.

One of the children sat down and cried … and we all cried … that a child had asked her at school why pigeons flew upside down over Australia and that the answer was it’s not worth shitting on. My overall impression was Australian were disliked. The notion Australians and Kiwis jibe at each other in characteristic displays of good-natured rivalry took a back seat.

One thing was for sure. I wondered what manipulations to the detriment of the population of New Zealand were puppeteered out of sight by powerful interests on both sides of the Ditch as I learned the Tasman Sea was referred to. We watched closely the television coverage of the New Zealand general election held in 1984 when PM Muldoon’s National Party lost and a Labour Party win made David Lange PM. In Australia the previous year we had watched as closely the defeat of the Malcolm Fraser led Liberal Party by the Bob Hawke phenomenon and Labor Party. The campaigns looked identical we thought, sounds, colours, style of speechs, slogans, huzzahs.

I was becoming kiwi-ised for all the stress. Aspects of the features of New Zealand and its people were permeating my awareness of where I was living. I thought them charming and even entrancing. I thought in it I picked up on short-sighted intransigence on the part of Australian Government to co-operate with a scheme the New Zealand Government advanced to boost tourism through-flow to Australia from Asia. My now late brother who was a public relations consultant based in Sydney and formerly finance journalist visited me briefly by coincidence. He declared he was on holiday. One day before he left to return to Australia he attended meetings in Auckland and pleased with the outcome he shared a detail of a projected

Fish and chips, every mans dream

reorganisation of a major New Zealand industry that was an icon. My take on it was of far reaching change to the look of the brand. I guessed at rather than knew the intimate detail, but I felt a searing pang of disillusion that was loyal to New Zealand. I had long established a belief in conservative change that was incremental if change was progressive and requisite. I saw the population of New Zealand and the country as too small and vulnerable to withstand catastrophic identity change as large as the one I thought I foresaw by instinct.

The social human animal absorbs the elements of its environment by powerful instincts when it is blind. A newly orchestrated and large scale drama was unfolding around me I knew only from its consequences of lived experience.

We speak next of melting pots and sequence that may seem like string. We touch on Rogernomics.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

 

Mark graduates from nursing school

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