70. On chatter

• Chatter, Silence and Focus
  
  Our lives are full of chatter, full of the noise of human voices, a constant chattering that not only comes from all around us, but that emanates from within our own heads. Radio and television provide a constant barrage of idle chatter, of small talk. Take talk back radio: It’s hardly ever a discussion we’re hearing - simply the sound of people who like the sound of their own voice. The airing of someone’s usually poorly articulated view.
  
  We chatter to each other to fill the silence, prattling on about this or that, and it is, to quote the Bible – Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians – ‘ a clanging gong or a sounding cymbal … signifying nothing’. And therein lies the nub of the thing: the lack of significance.
  
  In a wonderful line in his poem Australia, A D Hope writes:
  
  The Chattering of apes that passes as civilization over there …
  
  And let me be clear – I am as guilty of this ‘idle chatter’ as anyone.
  
  There is a scene in the film “As Good As It Gets” when the Jack Nicholson character attempts to express what it is that attracts him to the Helen Hunt character. He is an anti-social misfit, a writer of romance novels whose only pleasure in life is to insult and upset other people, an isolated, alienated, desperately lonely, thoroughly unlikeable man. But he sees something in the Helen Hunt character that others don’t see: that she only says things that she means, that she only talks about things that really matter, that when she speaks, it is about things she cares about deeply; she is honest, she is not putting on a show, a front, a façade. She speaks from the heart.
  
  There is distinction between ‘chatter’ and ‘conversation’. Conversation requires engagement: we engage with each other, we talk of things that matter. In one of his earlier songs, ‘The Dangling Conversation’, Paul Simons writes:
  And we speak of things that matter
  In words that must be said:
  Can analysis be worthwhile?
  Is the theatre really dead?
  
  And we sit and drink our coffee
  Couched in our indifference
  Like shells upon the shore
  We can hear the ocean roar.
  
  Simon gives us a brief glimpse of a couple whose relationship is drained of all meaning and life. The talk of ‘things that matter’ is, in fact, superficial chatter; each is actually ‘couched in indifference’, they are ‘shells upon the shore’ – no longer living creatures but empty shells, capable of seeming to produce the sound of the life force – the sea – but in fact lacking in substance, in life. The heart has gone from their ‘dangling conversation’.
  
  In his analysis of language, linguist M A K Halliday identified a wide range of functions – uses we put language to:



• To represent: to ‘name’ things



• To control others



• To express emotion



• To establish social contact



• To maintain social contact



• To include or exclude others from groups



• To inform or instruct



• To think ideas through

Interestingly, he also included ‘to fill time’, to fill the silence. Chatter is a way of breaking the silence.

I know of households where the TV is never off; it provides constant background noise – the chatter of voices and the sound of music. Many young people walk around with earplugs from their CDs, listening to their favourite music. They switch them off, though, when they are SMSing their friends. Of mobile phones, one 14 year old said, “I’d be lost without my phone. How could I talk to my friends.’

A young friend of mine set off on a journey around Australia recently. She and her friend took an I-pod with them - a little electronic gizmo that save you the problem of carrying large numbers of CDs. The I-pod carries literally hundreds of CDs on a silicon chip. The device is about the size of a cigarette box.

What is this need for the comfort of chatter? What is it about silence that makes us uncomfortable?

Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I craved company. I hated being alone – in part because I had grown up a lonely little boy with few friends. I recall a time when I was in my 20s. I was a teacher, as was my wife. We were living in Glenroy. If I arrived home from school and she was not there, I would become agitated and uncomfortable, and would go out and visit neighbours or friends. I hated being alone. It was as though I needed the reassurance and company of others to feel as though I existed. That’s the way I thought of it then: I lacked a strong sense of a self; I was defined by my social relations. I needed other people to tell me who I was.

I think I see it differently now. I think my ‘core self’ was always there, and it frightened me, because it was lonely, isolated, worthless. Give me the chatter of friends and acquaintances rather than the empty lonely shell that I feel when I am alone.
I think we chatter to fill the silence and to evade the truth. Chatter is a cover up, a time filler, a distraction from the deeper, significant things that trouble us. Silence frightens us – or at least some of us.

When Freud first developed psychoanalysis it was called ‘the talking cure’. These days there is a booming industry in talking cures of various kinds, psychotherapies of various persuasions. Our faith in the power of the spoken word to heal has a long long history. In the Catholic Church, people go to confession: “Forgive me Father for I have sinned”. They go through the ritual of confession, and they are given absolution; in the confession box, the sinner is cleansed, freed from the burden of sin. In Christian scriptures, Christ’s words can achieve miracles: the lame can walk again, even Lazarus can rise from the dead; it simply takes the words of Christ to achieve these things.

When couples are having trouble, they talk it over. They clear the air. The talk needed to ‘sort things out’ is, however, not chatter. It is the kind of deep conversation in which we say only the things that we mean, in which we only talk about things that really matter; when we speaks, it is about things we care about deeply; we are honest, we are not putting on a show, a front, a façade. We speak from the heart.

Not that that is always easy. And often, what we do have to say is painful both to ourself and to the other.
Silence is another possibility. When the spiritual seeker and writer, Thomas Merton, visited the giant statues of the Buddha at Polonnaruwa he saw them as standing for a way of life that “needs nothing” and can therefore “afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered.” They have “seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything – without refutation – without establishing some other argument … For the doctrinaire, such silence can be frightening.”

Spiritual traditions - whether Christian, Buddhist, New Age, whatever – have established silence at the core of the spiritual experience. In prayer, in silent meditation, we are able to ‘get in touch’ with god, with the spiritual.

Of meditation, Stephanie Dowrick writes (The Age Good Weekend Magazine, July 31, 2004):
There is a wonderful story told about the Buddha, who was once asked, “What have you gained through meditation?”
“Nothing at all,” he answered.
“Then, Blessed One, what good is it?” he was asked.
To which he replied, “Let me tell you what I have lost in meditation: sickness, depression, anger, insecurity, the burden of old age and the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to Nirvana (freedom from selfish and useless desires).”

She goes on to quote the Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius:

Are you distracted by outward cares? Then allow yourself a space of quiet, wherein you can add to your knowledge of the Good and learn to curb your restlessness. Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe.”

69. Obsessions: A Short Story?

In his sixty first year Simon became a new man.
“I am the focal point of the universe,” he wrote in his journal. “Gamma rays from distant quasars have been concentrated on my brain. The molecular structure of my synaptic networks have been rejigged.”

His friends thought it was a passing phase, like the religion he had adopted when 17, or the atheism he wore like a coat of many colours when he approached 30, or the adolescent hedonic lifestyle he launched into when he went through his early mid life crisis, when he was 38. It was then that he discovered sex and the female orgasm. He began to experiment, setting impossible targets and achieving them.

“Tonight, my sweet, you will experience twenty orgasms, each incrementally more intense than the one before, culminating in an orgasm of such insane intensity that your body will become one with the universe, and you and I will meld into a single being.”

Another passing phase,like his jam making when he turned 41.

“Stolen fruit is the secret. Stolen fruit makes the best jam.”
He would go on late night fruit picking expeditions to neighbouring houses and local parks, scrabbling around in the dark, and returning home scratched and bruised at one in the morning with a bagful of quinces or crab apples or apricots or nectarines. He made dozens of pots of jam, rich and sickly sweet, and gave them to friends. He didn’t have what it takes to become a economic baron of the jam world; he wanted to spread the sweet taste of jam…

He wrote a song, plagiarising the sentiments and some of the words of Leonard Cohen…
“And this jam, my loved ones, will pour like honey in the valleys of the lonely,
It will sweeten your breath, it will seduce your taste buds, it will bring joy to your very soul…”

Then there was the era of his psychiatric explorations, when Freud and Jung became twin gods in his spiritual universe, and he ignored Freud’s dictum – “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – and found deep meaning in the most transitory of superficial comments, and archetypal insights in the most ephemeral of his dreams.
At fifty five he became an obsessive poet, writing a poem a day: sonnets, limericks, villanelles, free verse flow from the dark creases of his brain matter, a sweet liquid flow of poetic lines that coursed their way through the catacombs and tunnels of his memory, following a course that seemed to him to represent truth.

“A poem a day. If I write a poem a day I will be a poet. A poet is one who writes poems; I am a poet.”

For days on end he would speak only in measured lines, forcing himself to create, at the very point of utterance, sentence after sentence cast in the sad rhythm of the iambic pentameter.
His days began and ended with a song,
with words that flowed like honey through his mind,
He held there, for the briefest moment, truth.
He saw the world transfigured to his sight,
the universe within a grain of sand,
eternity confined within a hour,
infinity he clasped within his hands.


But at sixty one he found his life’s purpose in a moment of epiphany. He suddenly saw how limited his life span would be. That he had, at the very best, ten thousand day left.

His obsession had become the writing of his lifework, his autobiographical work, which he entitled: The Encyclopaedia of My Life. His obsession had become the daily writing of this opus. He set himself the goal of writing, at the very least, a thousand words a day. Ten thousand days:
He tried to do the sum in his head, but his normally sharp arithmetical skills betrayed him, and so he wrote down the numbers, and labouriously calculated the answer:
10000 X 1000 = 10,000,000
Ten million words. Simon drew breath. Ten million words! 365000 words a year for twenty odd years.

Then his mind felt a slight shudder of recognition. In the past his left brain, segment A, Arithmetical calculation would have eaten that sum for breakfast. Simon prided himself on the simple enough task of multiplying 10000 by 1000. Perhaps his faculties were beginning to slow down , to crack up, to deteriorate; perhaps one of the great fears of his life – of a gradual sinking into senile dementia, into mental oblivion, into the loneliness of Alzheimers.

A joke twitched at the edge of consciousness. He’d read it just that morning … he scrabbled through his short term memory to find it…

But try as he might, it would not come out of hiding. He heard the echoes of its laughter, but could not for the life of him work out where the laughter was coming from.

That was when he realised he must cease with these obsessions. Obsessions, he now saw with the utmost clarity, were the sad, pathetic, doomed attempts of mortals to hang on to the ephemera of their lives. ‘Life is passing through our fingers like air, and we think we can grasp it!’ It was all pointless. All pointless. Who remembered his jams, still tasted the tart sweetness of his crab apple jelly? Did his lover recall the orgasms that melded them into a single being? And who could be bothered reading his endlessly repeated pentameters? And as for jokes, who would be there to tell his joke to anyway who would want to hear it? Even if he could remember it!

And then it was there, in its entirety. The whole joke. He could remember it. his faculties weren’t totally shot. He took out his notebook and began scribbling furious:
“There were three elderly men in an old people’s hostel. The 70 year old complains: “Ohh, aging is a terrible thing. You know, everything is starting to break down. I’m regular as ever – go and have a piss at 7 am every morning. But slow … it just keeps dribbling out for ten minutes….”

His 80 year old mate says, “I know….”

He paused briefly. Yes, he thought to himself, that’s what I’ll do.

And he stopped, took a new lined notebook from his desk draw, and wrote on the outside:
The Joke of a Lifetime
Encyclopaedia of the life of Simon D.

68. My Reading Life 9 Phillip Adams: "Adams V God - The Rematch"

I first came across Phillip Adams in the 1980s. I remember clipping from The Age a lengthy article that he’d written; it was on the anatomy of humour. I pasted it in a scrapbook. I recall little of the detail – other than his observation that our laughter humanises us. As the Pythons pointed out, in Life of Brian:

Life a bit of shit
When you look at it
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke it’s true
You’ll see it’s all a show
Keep ‘em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you ...

The last laugh is on you ... It’s a view that Adams endorses. Given the inevitability, the irreversibility of death, we must choose, ultimately but also every day, every moment, between laughter – at the absurdity of it all – and despair.

I still have that scrapbook stashed away somewhere in our garage – that Temple to the god of hoarding, that pointless paradise of accumulated ‘favorite things’ that, Karin assures me, will be burned or sent to the tip the moment I cast off my mortal coil. She can be sentimental at times; she can invest great significance into objects that in truth are of little worth. But my hoarding of books and objets de memoire get her down at times.

All of this is at the forefront of my mind at the moment because I’ve just finished reading Adams’ latest book, ‘Adams V God: the Rematch’. I have several of Adams’ books in my library. I may even have the original of Adams V God, which was published in the late 80s. I certainly have ‘The Unspeakable Adams’. He’s been around a long time, and has published around three million words.

Phillip Adams and I are almost contemporaries. He was born in 1939; I was born in 1943. We both grew up in Melbourne. He was probably still at Eltham High (the school my eldest daughter Jordan attends) when I started at Moreland High in 1955. As Adams tells it, he ‘turned way from God’ at the age of six when he grew dissatisfied with her grandson’s ‘inevitable question: “But who began God?”’ It took me much longer. At 15 I responded to Billy Graham’s call to give my life to Christ; by 18 I was heavily involved in the youth movement in the Methodist church, a youth club leader and a Sunday school teacher and a lay preacher. I didn’t declare myself an agnostic till I was around 24.

What lay behind Adams’ rejection of the Christian church and its teachings. I was surprised to discover that Adams’ father was a minister in the Congregationalist Church – the Reverend Charles Adams - but that the young Phillip was raised largely by his grandparents because Adams Senior was away at war. It’s tempting – it’s always tempting – to psychologise, to see some psychological link between the father’s absence and Adams’ rejection His Father which art in Heaven, along with His representatives on earth, especially His Holiness the Pope. [Interesting, Phillip’s mother also dumped his father, ‘in favour of a rather sleazy businessman’ about whom Adams has nothing positive to say.

Adams is an auto-didact. He ‘was forced’ to leave school before completing his secondary education; it doesn’t seem to have done him any great harm, going by his Wikipedia CV: writer, film producer, TV and radio presenter. He’s received awards for his ‘outstanding services to the Australian film industry’, declared a ‘Living Treasure’ by the national trust, awarded the Order of Australia, and made Australian Humanist of the Year in 1987. Even his nemesis, John Howard, expressed his disappointment that there wasn’t a “Right wing Phillip Adams”.

I suppose the closest thing we have to such a beast is the crass and tactless Andrew Bolt, who is more or an argumentative bully than an intellectual presence. For while Bolt is a propagandist, Adams is a deep thinker – outspoken, true, but unlike Bolt, never disrespectful of those whose views her disagrees with, never offensively dismissive of the right of others to have a view.

The problem for the likes of Howard is that the term “Right Wing Phillips Adams” is an oxymoron.

Ah – the outspoken, unspeakable Adams. Unspeakable – despicable in the eyes of some – and always outspoken. For a time there Saturday mornings were a great delight for me. I’d sit sipping coffee at Alta Vita restaurant in Eltham, and read the weekly offerings of my two favourite opinion columnists: Phillip Adams in the Weekend Australian magazine and Catherine Deveny in the A2 section of The Age. They have much in common: they both write well; both lean to the Left in their politics; both subscribe to the view that ‘God is Bullshit’. Deveny gave her comedy performance of 2011 that title and constantly offends god botherers with her outspoken dismissal of their precious beliefs. Adams is a different kettle of fish. He takes their arguments seriously; he is willing to ‘enter dialogue’ with believers the better to understand their ideas – then he dismisses them. Adams is the more intellectual of the two. Adams can be funny, and he’s always intellectually provocative; Deveny is more of a pub brawler – smart and very funny, and at times outrageous: which is what led her to be dumped by The Age. Which had the unfortunate effect of halving my enjoyment of Saturday mornings.

Adams V God: The Rematch brings together essays Adam has written over the past 30 years or more. The first half of the book consists of essays that appeared in the original Adams V God; the remaining essays , in the rematch section, come from the last two decades.

‘The atheist,’ Adams begins, ‘was once as lonely a figure as the biblical leper. No more. ... All of a sudden atheism is fashionable. In a world shaken by a perfect storm of fundamentalism it’s increasing it’s market share, even in the god bothering United States.

For many years Adams was one of Australia’s few ‘public atheists’; as he observes:

...when atheism was mentioned in Australia, it was often identified with me – in the same way that my namesakes, Herbert and George, were linked to meat pies or lottery tickets. I’d only myself to blame, having pontificated on death and religion, mortality and meaninglessness...

[That’s one of the many things I like about Adams: his joy in verbal play, and his ability to choose just the right word. In this case, pontificate has just the right touch of both ironic self-effacement and pompous posturing.]
For Adams atheism is the only real choice, the only world view that makes sense. As he says:

It’s astonishing that people still believe in God. One would have thought that by the middle of the twentieth century, surrounded by nuclear missiles, felt-wick pens, VCRs and Vitamin B capsules, that He would have faded away like that other improbably invention, the Cheshire Cat. Yet He lingers on and, in some ways, looms larger and loonier than ever.

Adams credo is straight forward enough: If you haven’t tested your beliefs, you’re not entitles to them.

He has no time for the Creationists and their attempts to indoctrinate children in Creation Science. Most for their intellectual dishonesty. They claim that they are being open minded, and simply want children to be able to choose between competing theories. The trouble is, theirs isn’t a theory – it’s a dogma. While scientists are constantly questioning their conclusions, testing how robust their conclusions against new findings, new insights, the Creationists push their unchanging truth: that God created the earth in six days and on the seventh day he rested. And the evidence for this? The Bible tells me so.

He saves his most savage verbal attacks for just these kinds of fundamentalists.
As a rough rule of thumb, he writes, the greater the certainty, the more ringing the conviction, the less the humour, the greater the cause to fear. The fundamentalists have created God in their own mean-spirited, frightened and humourless image. If there was a god, I think he would dislike fundamentalists as much as I do.

I’ve given up trying to even talk to fundamentalists because – well, there’s nothing to talk about. Nothing is actually open for discussion. While I avoid them, or having been stuck in a room with them, simply ignore them, Adams engages with them. He reports that he’s received thousands of letters from Christians attacking him for his ‘unspeakable’ and blasphemous writings. His response is to write in reply: ‘Let’s not let a little think like god stand between us.’ How that must rankle! It must drive them mad – madder actually!

Perhaps he is mellowing as he ages. Around page 169, he writes:
There was a time when I saw the world through ideological blinkers, when it seemed there was only one opinion and one truth. I now recognise that truth is a hopelessly jumbled jigsaw, and that everyone has a piece or two that fits with somebody else’s piece or two. And I’ve learned to enjoy the company of people I disagree with ... whereas I’m frequently bored by echoing agreement.

Echoes there of Voltaire, who said to one of his students who kept agreeing with the great philosopher: ‘For God’s sake disagree with me, so there can be two of us!’

At the same time I find myself agreeing with Adams at so many points. Like when he writes:

o I’m ... grateful for the opportunity, for the complimentary pass to life, the most extraordinary entertainment imaginable.
o Even a few decades ago the range of possibilities we know and accept with indifferent shrug would have seemed inconceivable.
o In the light of the plight of people in scores of other countries ... spending time complaining ... is insufferable and obscene.

And especially when he observes:
o For me the problem and the joy of living in this century is that you have to apply more and more paradigms to begin to comprehend the simplest event. That is the price of our learning curves.

God V Adams: The Rematch is, for me at least, a wonderful read. I will go back to it, again and again I think, to reacquaint myself with the highlights: his demolition of the Seventh Day Adventists, the Mormons, and – with particular relish – the Scientologists.

There is not a lot in this book about Adams ‘the person’; his autobiographical writing is limited to his first decade. He recently withdrew from a project to write his biography, falling out with his biographer just before the launch of the book over precisely this issue: the inclusion of too much of Adams’ ‘personal life’ and – so his biographer claims – in particular his relationships with women. The biography has been published, without Adams’ blessing.

There are two particular highlights in this book for me, however. The first is when he ‘comes clean’ about his own beliefs:

I believe it is absurdly vain to see ourselves as echoing God’s image and just as silly to anthropomorphise , to Disneyfy, the concept of God into anything vaguely human. Like the hippopotamus and the hedgehog, humans are simply an evanescent expression of the life force, as destined for oblivion as dodos and dinosaurs....
I believe in laughter. A highly developed sense of the absurd, particularly one’s own absurdity, is extremely healthy. As long as you’re laughing, especially at yourself, you’re unlikely to be brutal or vindictive... I think that all the things that divide us – from brands of god to national borders – are fairly silly and should be laughed at as often as possible.

Does Andrew Bolt ever laugh at himself? Or Peter Reith? Or John Howard? I sometimes catch a glimpse of Tony Abbott grinning as he trots out his infantile mantra “It’s another Great Big Tax”, as though he can hear how much like a six year old her sounds, but maybe it’s just a knowing sneer. Julia Gillard seems to take her own “moving forward” mantra with straight-faced seriosity.

In the final essay, Hello World, This is Me, Adams writes AS god – or is that as God?
‘I’m not as fond of you mob as you like to think,’ He confesses. Typically of Adams, God saves his final word for his nemesis:
You know the humans that most irritate me? The people that say I talk to them. In person. The ones that say they speak on my behalf. You must have notices that among their number are some of the most boring, self-important, fanatical and hypocritical people on Earth.... God help us.'

67. Anzac Day, 2011: It's not a soldier's job to question why

On Anzac Day 2011 I sang, for the sixth year, at the Warrandyte RSL Anzac Day commemoration. In previous years I have sung songs by Eric Bogle - And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda (twice) and Flanders Field - The Redgum song I was only 19, and A Pittance of Time by a Canadian singer named Kelly.

This year I wrote a song for the occasion. I dedicated the song to my grandfather, Nigal Arthur Bertram, who served at Gallipoli, and who was wounded five times in all during the First World War.

It’s not a soldier’s job to question why
(c) Barry Carozzi, 2011

I was there in 1915
I responded to the call
Went to fight for King and Country
In that war to end all wars
On the beach there at Gallipoli
It was my 19th year
I felt the surge within my blood
I felt the mortal fear

And I watched my comrades fall
I watched my comrades die
And they said, ‘It’s not your job to question why’
It’s not a soldier’s job to question why.

In the Battle of the Somme
In the trenches and the mud
With the head lice and the rats
With the bayonets and the blood
Midst the screaming of the gas shells
And the screaming of the men
There were sights I would never want to see again.

And I watched my comrades fall
I watched my comrades die
And they said, ‘It’s not your job to question why.’
It’s not a soldier’s job to question why.


Thirty years passed by
And they called me up again
I was stationed up in Darwin
Why the bombs began to rain
In the monsoon and mud
On that damned Kokada Trail
Outnumbered by the enemy
We knew the cost if we should fail


And I watched my comrades fall
But we knew the reason why
As we fought to hold our ground
I watched my comrades die


In the deserts of Tobruk
Where we lived like rats in holes
In the rice fields of Vietnam
Sick in spirit, sick in soul
In the hell that was Iraq
In that hell Afghanistan
Young people give their lives for someone else’s plan


And we’ve watched our soldiers fight
And we’ve watched our soldiers die
And sickened to the heart we’ve wondered why
There’s not a day when I don’t wonder why

BRIDGE

The sounds of weeping boys
And the cries of dying men
They haunt every generation
And it’s happening again
Will there ever be a time
When the sounds of battle cease?
Will there ever be a time
Can there ever be a time when live in peace?



And we’ve watched our comrades fall
And we’ve watched my comrades die
And they said, ‘It’s not your job to question why.’
It’s not a soldier’s job to question why.

66. Thelma's Story

I would have been 6 at the time. I must say, I don’t remember a lot. I do remember thinking it very strange that my dad was driving Uncle Garrie’s and Aunty Linda’s car. And I remember being all dressed up and being told we were going somewhere very special. Looking back, I think Uncle Garrie was just too excited to drive, and that was why my father drove the car. All I can remember of the drive was seeing the trams, and the tram lines and the overhead electric wires … And we came to this place, it was a big two storeyed building, like a hospital, and inside there were lots and lots of babies in all the rooms… lots of babies. And Uncle Garrie and Anty Linda had come to choose a baby to take home. As I said, I was only six. Maybe I thought that that was how families got babies – they went to a hospital and picked them up. Birth and sex and all of those things were not out in the open as they are today. I don’t remember exactly when I was told about your being adopted. I just remember that Mum called us all inside one day – Val, my sister, and Ray, my brother, and me – and we were told that you were adopted, and we were sworn to secrecy, and told that we must never, ever tell anybody, or talk about it. So we didn’t. That’s how it was in those days. If you’re parents told you not to mention something, you didn’t. So it was never mentioned. You were our cousin, and that was that. We didn’t think of you any differently from the way we thought about our other cousins – Lynette and Faye. That’s how Thelma tells the story. I wonder, though. It’s true, though. It was never mentioned – at least not in my presence. Not once, during the first 66 years and 50 days of my life. Not until I was almost an old man. And yet I did feel an outsider. Not quite accepted, not quite included. My mother felt it too, I think. I’m not sure if it was that she felt excluded because she had only one child, or because that child wasn’t quite accepted by the extended family. But then, there is an orphan in all us. We all feel excluded at times, orphaned, not quite wanted. We stand around on the edges of the circle, desperately hoping someone will invite us to join in. We feel slights – the parties we aren’t invited to attend, the way people turn their heads away when we are halfway through a story – distracted easily, not attending to us, because we don’t quite measure up. We look at other families whose lives seem so much more interesting than our own. So we sulk, and feel sorry for ourselves; or we stamp our feet, and demand attention; or we show off so that others will notice us; or we pretend we are ill; or we save injured birds or stray cats because we ourselves are injured, or strays; or we become angry with the world, and act out our misery, and make them pay for the pain that life has inflicted on us. As for me, I’ve done all of those in my time. Mostly, though, I’ve chosen a few well worn strategies. I’ve spent a lot of time, up on the high board, attempting dives at the very limits of difficulty. I’ve also spent lots of time looking to re-create Eden, a Utopian community wherein I have my place. And like all of we sad and sorry humans, I’ve longed for – and at times found – a sustaining intimacy with another.

65. Barry, 3 months

The inscription of the back of the photograph reads ‘Barry, 3 months’. In all likelihood the photograph was taken on Saturday, September 11, 1943. There are two people in the photo itself. The man was in his 38th year at the time. He is dressed for a special occasion; he is wearing his Sunday Best suit. Most people would guess that he came from an Italian background; there’s something about his build, his face, his suit and tie that suggest this.

He looks a little uncomfortable. Ill at ease. Perhaps it is in part because this simple man feels out of place in a suit. He is an unskilled labourer who left school at the age of 14, in 1919, unable to read or write. For years he had been ‘kept down’. When he left St. Fidelis Catholic school in 1919 he was still in Grade 5. That must have been a heavy burden to bear, being 14 and illiterate, and surrounded by 10 and 11 year old who could both read and write. In September 1943 Australia was at war, but this man had been deemed unsuitable for service in the army, because of his flat feet. He was working, at the time, at Davis and Coop, a brick works in Brunswick . A year or so later he would change jobs, move to a factory in Macauley, a rabbit works, where he would spend his days gutting and skinning rabbits.

Working class men, like him, unskilled and poorly educated, rarely wore suits. Suits came out of the wardrobe for special occasions: weddings, funerals, baptisms, confirmations, church on Sunday. And when they did, they smelt of moth balls. But he was not one for church on Sunday.

Nor was his older brother, Arthur, who held radical views, who was a socialist – and possibly a communist, though he denied it in his later years. He was a street orator in the war years, railing against conscription on street corners in the city of Melbourne and on the Yarra bank. Arthur – or Arturo, as he was named at birth - had also left school at 14, but was self educated, widely read in the works of Marx and Engels and Lenin, a man who spent the Saturday afternoons of his adolescent years in the aisles of Coles Book Arcade in the City of Melbourne, reading economics and literature and politics texts. Arthur was an avowed atheist, and his younger brother – the man in the photo – was a lapsed Catholic.

Unlike Ina, their younger sister, who never missed Mass, and who prayed two and three times a day, for an hour at a time, fingering her rosary beads and muttering ‘Hail Mary, mother of God, full of grace …’

The man in the photo holding the baby is Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi, son of Annibale Carozzi, an Italian jeweller and linguist who migrated to Australia via Berlin and London in the mid-late 1880s. Annibale met, and later married, Caterina Mazza. Caterina was the daughter of Gianni Mazza who had left his native city of Genoa, in northern Italy, in the early 1860s to travel to the Victorian goldfields, there to make his fortune. Or not, as it turned out.

He married a girl who had been born in Daylesford in 1852, a girl named Margaret Burnside. Margaret’s mother was Mary O’Leary, an Irish orphan girl from County Cork, who had been sent to the colony by the Catholic nuns during the worst Potato Famine in Ireland’s sorry history.

The 17 year old Mary O’Leary met 32 year old Alexander Burnside – Sandy as he was known – in Willaura in South Australia. Sandy was a wayward Scot, the son of a Glasgow doctor; he was an alcoholic ne’er-do-well who was said to drink half a pint of whisky a day, and who died of alcoholic debilitation at the age of 64, and laid to rest in the Presbyterian section of the Daylesford cemetery, beneath an imposing headstone. Mary outlasted him by 20 years or more, but lies buried in an unmarked grave in the Catholic section, with two other dead Catholics.

As Alexander approached death, so the story goes, Mary said to him, ‘Will you be buried in Catholic ground?’

‘No!’ he said. ‘I will lie at rest in Presbyterian soil.’

‘Then you shall sleep alone through eternity,’ Mary told him.

And so it was, and is. Their graves are 100 metres apart, separated in death – as in life – by their religious prejudices. And now by tons of dark, rich cemetery soil.

So Herbert was their grandson, and Annibale’s and Caterina’s son. He was born and raised and lived his whole life in Coburg and died there in 1989. In this photo, taken on September 11, 1943, he is smiling; but nervously, and looks ill at ease. Perhaps it is the suit, but I sense it is something more. He is holding his three month old son, but there is something not quite right; he looks uncomfortable, unpractised, as though he is unused to this business of holding a baby.

Nonetheless there is no doubting the simple joy, the happiness of this moment, for Herbert Garrie. He’s happy – no question. But look closely at the baby. Its eyes are wide, its mouth is open, and its look is one of … of what? Fear? Bewilderment? Or perhaps I am reading all of this into the photograph, spinning a story – as we are prone to do, we humans – from the flimsiest of information. Taking that trite old saying, that a ‘picture is worth a thousand words’, and romancing – getting carried away with the story. Extemporising. Seeing discomfort in the demeanour of the father, bewilderment – perhaps fear – in the eyes and facial expressions of the child.

How much can we glean from a single photograph, a snapshot. It is a long gone moment, this moment captured on light-sensitive celluloid sixty – almost seventy - year ago. Cameras don’t lie, they say; but they are not necessarily right. In this moment – it may have lasted for one-fiftieth of a second - the child seems to look confused, the father uncomfortable; but it may all be a trick of the eye, no more than a random moment in a day otherwise full of easy joy and happy smiles …

The photo ‘tells’ us little. It is the story teller who spins the yarn, who builds the narrative, who interprets the scene and makes of it what he will. It is the story teller who blends his knowledge of the back stories of these two ‘dramatis personae’ with the features of the photograph, to begin to tell the story of Barry, at three months, and the father, Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi – known variously as Garrie, Herbie, Uncle Garrie, Dad.

I’ve had that photograph since the late 1980s or early 1990s. Garrie died in 1989; his wife, Linda, in 1991. I found it in Linda’s glory box when I was cleaning out their house at 82 Reynard Street, Coburg, where they had lived since their marriage in 1936. I placed the photo in an album, to keep it as a relic. A sacred enough object. Yet I did not notice the inscription – ‘Barry, 3 months’ until sometime in mid-late September, 2009 – 66 years after the photo was originally taken.

Linda and Garrie were my mother and father. I lived with them all through my childhood, from 1943 until 1969, when I married. Linda Robina May Kipping was born on October 26, 1907, in Casterton in the Western District of Victoria. She lived in Hamilton for most of her childhood with Pop and Gran: William Charles Kipping, my grandfather, and Edith Kipping (nee Davis), my grandmother. Linda left Hamilton some time in the mid-late 1920s, and came to live in Melbourne, where she worked for ‘French, the dentist’ as a housekeeper and cook, and helped raise their two boys: Vincent and Ronnie, both of whom carried on the family business and themselves became dentists.

Linda was 29 and Garrie 31 when they married in 1936. I was born 7 years later. In the intervening years Linda had had several miscarriages and had given birth to a still born boy child, in 1941. The photo inscribed ‘Barry, 3 months’ is – to my knowledge – the earliest photograph of me, and the only one taken in my first year of life.

When I first noted the inscription, it was September 2009, 66 years after the photo was taken – almost to the day. At a time when those three words had suddenly become burdened with an almost unbearable weight of meaning. For in mid September 2009 the incredible significance of that simple inscription became explosively apparent.

It arrived like a message in a bottle, a scrap of information placed inside a bottle and thrown into the sea years before, and now amazingly washed ashore. What was it Eliot wrote?

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

The message, written in code, could now be decoded, and the world could never be quite the same – not for this little pebble on the beach, not for this little 3 month old babe, who 66 years on stares at this image of himself, and sees a stranger – a bewildered, fearful infant, held in the uncertain arms of a simple and loving man who felt, at that moment, out of his depth, not knowing quite how you do hold a child so young. Happy beyond measure, but overcome by the responsibility. And on that day in September, the bewilderment in my three month old eyes mirrored the sudden bewilderment in which I found myself at 66.

64. A Teacher's Reflective Journal 4: a week is in long time in teaching

Love letters

It's Saturday afternoon. I've just woken from a short nap. It's been a tiring week. So far today I have read and commented on around six Year 12 SACs. Each SAC takes around 30 - 45 minutes to 'process'. I remember how impatient I used to be with correction, how I would put it off for as long as I could. Teaching writing in the TAFE Professional Writing course cured me of that.

I think that I'm clearer now about what to do, how to respond, the kinds of things to comment on. Many English teachers resent the hours and hours spent in reading and responding to what the students write. It is THE perennial topic for the English teacher's complaint. We compare the assessment load in English with - say - Maths and can see - well, there's no real comparison. Correcting a page of sums is not unlike correcting a spelling test.

We need to do what they do with diving - designate a difficulty level [DL] for the various types of correction - on a 5 point scale.

Jump into the pool from the edge and make a splash DL 0.1 [That's marking a 50 word Spelling test]

Do a swallow dive, with a twisting triple somersualt, plus pike DL 4.95. [That's the Year 12 SAC: an 800 - 1500 word essay, with six marking criteria]

Yes, it's not fair that we spend so many of our weekends reading our students' work and writing our notes to them. Yes, there ought to be some recognition of the DL - and the size -of the English teacher's assesssment load. But the other side of it is this: what an opportunity! My year 12 have done pretty well on their Reading their SACs. The shortest is around 700 words; some are as many as 1500.

We've been studying David Malouf's novel Ransom. It's hard work - a retelling of a single scene from Homer's The Iliad: Priam's ransom of Hector's body. We started the year looking at the opening 20 minute from Dead Poets' Society: the start of the new school year, the pomp and ceremony, the arrival of John Keating, the charismatic teacher pl;ayed by charismatic actor Robin Williams. The scene in which Keating takes his boys to the glass cabinets in the school foyer, where the honour boards and old photos are housed. Pitt reads:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

For summer is aflying

And that sweet rose that blooms today

Tomorrow ill be dying

Keating points to the photos: "A hundred years ago they were like you are today ... but they are now food for worms... It's hard to believe it, but one day we too will stop breathing, become cold and die... Carpe Deim - Seize the day, boys - make your lives extraordinary."

Ransom took us into similar territory ... death and meaning in life... being yourself ... or constantly wearing a mask ... becoming human ... being a father, a son ... being a mother ... being a grandfather ... what matters in this life ... Ransom is hard work. But I can see, in their responses to the SAC, that many of my students have been thinking about Priam and Achilles and Hecuba and Somax - the central characters of the novel. And they have been thinking about themselves. Literature touches on the personal in ways that Quadradic equations and theorems in geometry and scientific experiments and Legal Studies generally do not.

My friend Misha, in a comment on one of my earlier reflections on teaching reminded me of how carefully we need to move, as teachers, when in this minefield of the personal: Personalised writing was something I remember from your writing class and even I found it to be quite confronting.... Sometimes the class felt more like a group therapy session than a writing class - no offence. It is difficult, especially for teenagers to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings to their peers or to anyone for that matter - especially teenage boys. I did grow to love the personal element of your class, but only as I grew older and became more confident and self assured. Her comment - 'No Offence' - is unnecessary. I'm not offended; but it raises the moral dilemma of where the line is drawn. Literature provides the safe ground, I think. [Though, of course, no ground is really safe...] All of which is something that might be worth pursuing in a later blog. I don't have time for it right now; I still have five SACs to complete.