Dad Knows Everything.

As a father you give a lot to your children. Not just the material things; toys, books, clothing, food and shelter, and all those vitally important, fashionable and expensive items that will have the lifespan of a mayfly. Much more than that you give of yourself. I was in Melbourne recently, talking to my father as he spoke about a discussion with my brother, and I was amazed at his patience, his gentleness and the relaxed way in which he put his own concerns second to being a loving and patient father after doing this for fifty-five years now.

It's something I learned from him many years ago when my kids were small, and which my brother is learning now as he raises his two sons, both still under school age. My youngest is now twenty-five and the oldest thirty-four. All three girls, all smart, capable young women we love and cherish all we can. 

And it was only  a few years ago that I gave them a gift that cost me more than I thought it would at the time. When they were young I would answer every question they brought to me with a confident, calm and loving voice. With authority, and education and certainty I would listen carefully to their questions, taking them and their question equally seriously, and give precisely the truthful and complete answer.

When they would ask me how I knew the answer I would simply say, with equal authority,

"Dad knows everything."

This worked so well that before long they would come to me with any and all of their problems, in perfect expectation that Dad did indeed know absolutely everything. Most of the time this was because their questions were simple, or they were about people, which I understand better than I do physics, for example. When they reached the age at which their questions were more complex, or about complex relationships I would talk them through a process of examining their own assumptions, motives and behaviours. 

Years spent as a psychotherapist came in very handy here, providing me with skills and processes that meant I could walk them through a step-by-step process towards their own solutions. But more than that I was always interested in their lives, their worries and problems, no matter how small or how serious. Dad knows everything gave them the absolute certainty, not just that they were loved and respected, but that there was never going to be a problem in life that would overwhelm them. Their safety and security were backed by Dad's encyclopaedic brain as well as his strong right arm.

The benefits of this for me were wonderful. I was adored by my girls, always loved and respected and always the one to whom they could and would bring any problem. They would even show me off to their friends, who were almost always envious of such a sage and wise paterfamilias who could answer any question, and was willing to put aside any task to do so.

All good things come to an end, however. And a few years ago, sitting around a dinner table I broke the spell. The question I don't remember. The atmosphere was convivial, laughter and wine and the fun of a family Christmas feast had us all relaxed. And my youngest asked me a simple question. 

"I don't know," I said, "Dad doesn't know absolutely everything."

The girls laughed, and made mock of a poor old man who had only been fooling all this time. 

"Aha!"

"So, you really don't know everything!"

"Aha, I knew it! You've been faking it all along!"

Oh, it was cruel and terrible and sad. (Listen, you can hear the violins!) 

And the effect was instantaneous. I saw that particular awe in which they held me disappear right before my eyes, never to return. They don't come to me with their problems so much these days. Which I miss. But then, they don't need to. They grew up surrounded by safety and certainty. Now that they're grown they can meet the world on their own terms. And the last gift I could give them was to pull back the curtain and show them that the great and powerful Oz was really just an ordinary, if well-researched, man pretending to be omniscient. 

I miss those years, and that role, still working and fully functional only a little while ago. But once the illusion is gone it's gone forever. Which is as it should be. And it's not such a great loss. After all, my Dad did the same for me, and he survived it. That we can talk to each other as equals now, as friends, is because I've learned by doing the same for my girls.

On Being a Samurai.

.

 

Writer, thinker, teacher and trainer, therapist, shaman, initiate, musician, mystic, intellectual, samurai, priest, magician, psychic, empathic, mythologist, shape-shifter, husband, father, lover, Kabbalist, Tantric and Gnostic.

It's been a long, strange trip.

About twenty-five years ago I was a management consultant running a communications skills workshop for a team of young professionals: psychologists, social workers, speech therapists and so on, all intelligent young women in their twenties or early thirties (I've certainly had worse jobs). During conversation it emerged that one woman, a social worker, had a particular skill that she would occasionally agree to do for people. She read palms. She went pink from embarrassment when it was brought up, but agreed after some encouragement to read mine.

She took my hand in hers and leaned forward until her face was over it, her blonde hair falling forward around her face, and gently stroked my palm and began to speak. But not about lines and ridges and loops on the skin. She just slipped straight into a trance state and spoke in a faraway voice about my life, my past and my inner self. It was fascinating. And accurate enough about the real me to give me food for later thought. After she finished and her face regained its frank, friendly countenance I said,

"That's an incredible gift. You really should develop it."
.

"Oh, no." She said.

"Why ever not?"

"Because I don't want to be thought of as a freak."

I know how she feels.

For most of my life I've been fighting that particular epithet.

But while I may not be a freak I am definitely not one of the normal. And it's true that my natural milieu is among the peculiarly gifted, the psychics and second-sighters, the freaks and the fey. I don't like it, but it's true. It's what I am. Like the list of qualifications above. I am all of those things. For an introvert with a healthy level of paranoia hiding this has become second-nature. Experience has taught me that keeping  my light under a bushel is far better than trying to fend off a pack of freaked-out village idiots with a pitchfork, a smile and a plausible explanation.

But no more. 

I am what I am. 

All of it.

I became a samurai in 1992. 

I've been a martial artist since I was eight years old. Forty-seven years of judo, karate, iaido (Japanese sword kata), halberd, spear, longbow, crossbow. Anything and everything up to and including small arms. Years spent studying and developing subtle forms of thinking and awareness and spiritual attitudes (Zenshin, Zanshin, Mushin and the rest) that began with Zen meditation and led in the end to ritual magic and Kabbalah. I spent years refining my skills and my spirit, up at dawn and building a Tree of Life the size of a cathedral down by the Brisbane river, with the ten spheres each filled with their own kata, and connected by long galloping runs with blades whirling and sweat running.

Now, here in Canberra I can see every inch of it in my minds eye, recall every blade and bird and tree, feel the sun burning off the grey mist in autumn, scorching the ground to dust at midsummer.

Like I said, it's been a long strange trip.

But it takes more than simple competence or even a lifetime of acquiring skills to become a samurai. There's a simple qualification that goes beyond this. You have to serve. You have to be accepted as a retainer by a noble house. Which happened to me in '92.

Her name is Maeda Asano and she came to Brisbane to teach Iaido at the club I was attending, and to demonstrate Ryushin Ryu Kenbu, a combination of dance, sword, fan and spear work used to tell stories of Japanese historical events. Meetings between famous samurai, incidents during famous battles, demonstrating the techniques used at the time. She was also a 'living national treasure' in Japan for her ikebana flower arranging.

She would have been in her 60s then. I volunteered to do some PR work for her, and arranged ABC news to interview her and show a demonstration of her art in a bamboo grove at the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. I was also able to involve her in an Asian Cultural festival and a highlight for me was leading a huge procession along Brisbane's Southbank with Maeda San, with my youngest daughter Ellen marching along between us. Despite my having only 'dojo and sushi' Japanese, and her having no English we were able to communicate and I was much taken with her grace, dignity and bearing.

At the last training session, just before she left, I presented her with a box full of Australian bird feathers I had collected, yellow cockatoo crests, beautiful reds, greens and blues from rosellas, and black and white magpie feathers like the black and white of hakama and dogi. I'd prepared a short speech (in hastily scribbled phonetic Japanese) expressing my thanks for her generosity and patience, and formally offering myself for her service. This I carefully read out in the car park, surrounded by mystified fellow students. She listened seriously and intently. 

She accepted the box with a graceful bow, then quickly snatched the crumpled paper I'd read from and tucked it away in her kimono. She then took a purple and gold fan from her obi and presented it to me with a smile. She had formally accepted my offer.

I've been thinking about her a lot recently, particularly when I found the fan last month while tidying up the study. I found out this afternoon that she passed away that day, January 7th. Which I suppose makes me a ronin, and my own man. 

I don't have the words I said that day. 

But I do have a haiku I composed for her, while watching her perform in the bamboo grove.

                                 When she moves her feet
                                 turn small circles in the dust,
                                 Maeda Asano.

I'll be transferring this blog to a new website soon: leekear.com

Thursday 24 October, somewhere over America.

Thursday 24 October 2012, somewhere over America.

"It's time to walk away and start over again" sings Tom Waits.

Heading for home, finally. The last few weeks have been exhausting, packed with event, image and experiences both good, better and only occasionally less than perfect. The gifts of the attendant genius of a nation scattered like diamonds in the snow, hidden in the grey and humid Halloween mists of a New York Indian summer.

Vermont is deep in the past already, a workshop that was exhausting, enlivening and memorable. I haven't felt like this in years, the old thrill of changing tack on the fly, re-writing and inventing new material between sentences. And what did we learn? That I'm too old for this particular game. My time is better spent on content not process. Just because you can still do it doesn't mean it's yours to do. It's not as if there's not enough writing for me to do.

TheTempest was a revelation. I'd been waiting for LeMoyne Theatre's studentproduction for a year, since the mention of it last September gave me goose flesh. We saw a rehearsal, the full play with all its secrets and hidden magics uncovered. Reduced to ninety minutes but with all the pieces I needed handed to me like a string of rosary beads unloosed. The Aristeas tale fits better than a glove, as we discovered talking to the director, a brilliant, gentle man quietly crafting and polishing the facets of his gems. He does more than he knows, as he well knows. Magic is as magic does. 

Outside, from Vermont to Maryland, the Autumn leaves still drop like tiny glowing flames with a softness of sound unlike anything but it's own measured whisper and plash. Like a paper waterfall, pouring relentlessly, one drop at a a time. After five weeks their relentless beauty, from the iridescence of the Adirondacks to the distant purple of Long Mountain, is overwhelming.

The sweaty hustle and charge of New York City seems like another lifetime, another world, another yellow moon over the Hudson with the Jersey Shore hidden in the haze, and the Gate to the Underworld hidden in plain sight in Georgia O'Keeffe's masterpiece. The Black Iris sits silent amongst the paint and adulation of the Met, the clatter of tourists and the silence of painters long dead, dark beyond the night and deeper still. If ever you needed a place to shout a secret into the earth-mother, never to be known or discovered, here she is, the Black Madonna with her skirts lifted to hide the clatter and roll of any fugitive soldier. 

Oskar Matzerath, the little Tin Drummer of Prussia becomes confused in my head with all the drummer boys of the Civil War, dressed alike in blue and gray and fear. Their awed faces stare out of tintypes and daguerreotypes with the same shocked, blank, drained expression. All of their understandings have been blown to pieces, left torn and maimed in the fields and streams, draped like rags along the crooked fences.

It's only been a week since we walked Antietam battlefield, walking the field on a clear and windy afternoon, autumnal, bucolic and subtly deceptive. There's new corn growing in the Cornfield, and there's two Wisconsin girls at the fatal corner where the Iron Brigade broke through that morning, losing 5,000 men to the guns of Colonel Thomas Lee.

They're sentinels, perfectly uniformed and armed, two Wisconsin Black Hats, pickets of the Iron Brigade still keeping vigil, doing time for their long-lost great-great-great grandfathers: two survivors of a bloody morning in a September long ago, who came home whole but broken in spirit. The girls are respectful and fit the small-framed uniforms perfectly, but they're embarrassed by what their forebears became, an opium addict, a ne'er do-well, a drifter.

The ghosts are piled thick, one upon another in Bloody Lane. There are patches, 'neath a tree at the corner, under a green ridge along the front rampart a little further on, where you can feel the men who died here. Not in general but personally, each one a soul snuffed out too soon, too often fighting for a folly not of their own making. It's cold here, even in the sunshine. The voices will speak, if you listen. But I'm done with that, for the most part. I leave them to whisper to others, to each other of their grief and surprise, and disappointment.

Tommy Meagher was sentenced to penal servitude in Tasmania at 21 for his Fenian ways, and escaped to freedom in America at 26. Now a Brigadier, he led the New York Irish in their charge across the rising ground from Antietam creek. His men suffered greatly, cut down by the hundred by the volleys of the Virginia Volunteers. Their sunken cart-track was a perfect gun trench, until at last  the Irish crossed the ridge and got amongst them. Then it became a trap, with no way out, back or forwards. They died together by the thousand. 

At Burnside's bridge the wind was cold and picking up while we were flagging with the day. As we stood, too tired to go down, a shape-shifting re-enactor broke out of the smoke down on the bridge and charged the bluff, with grit and sand, and heroic folly. He held the colours high, picked out by the slanting sun as he became a silhouette, defying the years and the fire of the 500 on the bluff.

We became connected to spirits of place long gone, but ever present in a landscape still in shock, still filled with awe. Sacred ground, yet unholy. For why should 23,000 men die for others to cross a field, take a ditch and cross a bridge? To pay for ground stolen from others? Is this how America grows? And all to be reduced to a liars competition to rule it all 150 years later. The death-instinct is deep in people, and here they carry guns, and still dream the old, false dreams of glory amid the tears.

The election campaign rolled on like a deadly, mind-numbing juggernaut. A behemoth of words, of lies with a half-life of just hours. We saw Bill Clinton speak in a humid hangar at a rainy Syracuse Airport. He still has the same incredible empathic connection, the charismatic appeal and warmth that reaches you behind your cynicism. But he's aging, and the miles are beginning to tell. He reminded me of seeing Gough Whitlam speak in Brisbane in the early 90's. Still the towering intellect, the Olympian manner and the weight of moral power, yet diminished, more by the age of his audience than the aging of his message. Their lack is what's missing from the exchange, not his. They know not what they do not do. 

 With Clinton it was a brisk run through a speech he's been giving three times a day in three different states for weeks now, flogging the horse beyond hope in the clear knowledge of what this is costing him personally. No matter what the outcome, this is shortening his life, and he knows it. But the stakes are too high so not to do. The appalling nature of Romney is his naked ambition, spilling out in the 'gaffes' when his idiot greed for position and power brushes aside his paper-thin charm and appeal. There's no cracking of the mask, because he has no mask. This vacuum is really who he is, sans truth, sans heart, sans concern and compassion and utterly sans content. Whatever he once believed it's long since been traded away. This truly is form without function, just ugly, sincere, unctuous absence.

What's been truly shocking is how much more attention we pay to their politics than do most of the Americans we've met. That and the sheer brass neck of shameless, guileless lying, day after day, debate after debacle. That it's discussed and dissected every day by what passes for journalism without someone screaming that this is ugly, twisted and vile, an enormity beyond the form and shape of real politics is what's most staggering. How did we come to the point that a blatant lie, repeated and embellished upon daily, gleaming like a gilded turd, can be accepted as legitimate political discourse?

My senses, and sensibilities, became numb by the time we reached Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's slave-run pleasure dome and personal Xanadu. Perhaps it was the wearing mileage, the hundreds of miles we had covered that made it so, but the Crossroads Inn, a tiny Bed and Breakfast in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania meant more, was more, lived more of the eighteenth century than Jefferson's mountain-top fantasy of enlightened living.

The couple who ran the place (Colonial Crossroads B&B) have spent seven years creating a 'true down to the handmade nails' living example of boots and britches life in the 1790s. After a gloriously comfortable four-poster night we shared breakfast with the inn's guests at a narrow form table before the hearth, politely discovering the US Navy lad and his spouse, en route to New Orleans from Fort Benning. He in a grey t-shirt with NAVY proudly proclaimed in blue upon it. She in a pink-spangled 'Anchors Aweigh' top that stated her love, fidelity and fey proprietorship. At the other end a New Jersey couple, he older by a decade, were friendly and provincial.

The pewter tableware, polite conversation, good manners and low ceilings reminded me of old wooden ships and the breeches I wore at school at other long tables, and I became an aged and compatible Steven Maturin with no effort whatsoever. 

 By comparison Monticello was a museum of quaint and obvious hypocrisy. The guide's genteel southern charm assured us that, while DNA had proved disturbingly conclusive, Jefferson's long term love-affair with his slave Sally Hemmings detracted not one whit from his stellar accomplishments, his place in noble history, his 'let freedom ring' words and hot air.

He freed only five of his two hundred slaves in his will. Which means some of his own children remained slaves. The estate was bankrupt, and this, apparently, was a perfectly acceptable reason in these United Sates to deprive human beings of their right to the pursuit of whatever happiness a slave can dream of. We came away enlightened, perhaps, but only more aware that the weight of the architecture, with all it's quirks and charms, was raised only on the slave quarters, the kitchens and the locked and bolted smokehouse and ale house.

It's music. That's the big thing I'm bringing home with me, the weight of our baggage notwithstanding. The older I get, the more it means, every kind, every style, every chord and confection; the more it affects, the more it touches me in ways that were once only the province of love, and sex, and imminent death. The rock and roll that lit up my late teens is still with me. My tastes have matured but not changed. But each flourish, each little touch of artistry, each riff, glissando or sprinkle of echo, of style and substance mix't lifts my spirit more than I can explain or reason why.

There is a power in this that I understand intellectually, but nonetheless cheers and heartens me with such power and joy that I am constantly surprised. It makes the prospect of age less disconcerting. If music gives me this there is little I cannot face.

And at home there are guitars, in ranks and battalions, to be enjoyed. Soon, soooon!

PS: Somewhere over the Pacific .. Bruce Springsteen has the best political statement of the entire US election campaign - We Take Care Of Our Own, first track on the new album Wrecking Ball.

 PPS: for those who may have been wondering how long it would take 'our' magpies to realise we were home and turn up for a feed, the answer is twenty minutes, and in the dark.

On Writing.

.
Writing, in and of itself, is nothing.
Writing, in and of itself, is everything.
Writing, in and of itself, is enough.
Writing, in and of itself, can never be enough.

Writing, in and of itself, is the one truly human act of creation.

An unlettered child can sing and make music. An untutored child can draw or paint a picture. But to write requires mastery, the drawing together of language, logic and rhetoric in the flow of thoughts and ideas, streams of consciousness, poetic metre and prosaic rhythm. To write requires a consciousness beyond the self, beyond the itch and scratch of animal need, beyond the demotic prosody of circumstance; beyond the fixations of a fevered mind, the obsessive ordering of black and white, the chicken scratchings on white vellum that betray a mind too narrow and too cluttered.

Yet writing, in and of itself, is destruction, a crucifixion, the nailing of bloodied words to the white and plastic page. The deaths of endless possibilities lie cold and grim 'neath the gravid wealth of words. At twelve minutes past four in the morning I lie sleepless and uncomfortable. I press old hands against tired eyes. Words and ideas form in flashes of green and blue, exploding like raindrops on a slate roof, their vital water running into dark gutters, sluiced into oblivion. Unless I rise and write they'll slip away, stripping meaning from my mind in shreds and shards, pouring the endless flow of babble and cant into the darkness.

Yet to rummage in the cluttered drawers of self-regard and bathos does not constitute writing. For something further demands itself. A net of meaning that strains our glittering thoughts from the air, a lacework web of hooks that catches the mind of another, and another. Writing is more than typing or calligraphy. It links pure spirits, one to another. Successful writing calls spirits together.

And in that meeting something more is spawned. Living things are formed and shape themselves, drawing light and breath and existence from the ether. From the play of words, from style and substance, chirp and charm, from word and meme and memory. And we must create ourselves with the net, with the lacework tale, the story of our self and our words, or else disappear, fade like fog in wisps and whispers, vanish like love in tears and tantrums.

For if writing is the one truly human act of creation, then all writing springs from love. From the cleaving of separate selves from the All and One, from the cleaving together of kindred spirits. Sentences spring to bridge the gap elastic, stretching out to one another, drawing us in each to the other. Love calls forth and we must answer. The urge to be, to unite, to be known is unanswerable, more demanding and more stern than any mistress. A love of self that is truly selfless, the love for another that is our truest self, our most honest need and gravest weakness.

Our words we weave to bridge the unbridgeable. Bright phrases bubble in the dark, spreading light in flashing smiles. Turns of phrase return and turn again. Rare words like lepidoptera open sunlit wings, winking with false eyes. The juggle of wit and the gaudy display of learning conspire in secret falsehoods, inviting and ever misconstrued. We tell our lies in one another's heads. And on we write or like the circling shark die of lost momentum and petered-out thoughts, of loves lost and little princes found. The sandalled footprint of childish wisdom disappears into the desert of silence. The eye that reads blinks once and we are gone. Our words fade from the virgin page, restoring virtue in perfect punctuation.

To write is to exist.

.

Beauty & The Beak

~

He’s a clumsy bugger. Vigorous, but awkward, tossing meat and cheese everywhere when he rummages for the right piece to eat. Ungainly is a good word for him. I’m not precisely sure what gainly looks like, but he certainly ain’t it. But he’s alive. Very much so and against all the odds.

When I got back to Brisbane after Easter in Canberra he was there, and the growth over his eye seemed to have broken away, or been scraped off. The scales having fallen he could see both sides, but the lump on his beak limited his forward vision, so he couldn’t give me that meaningful look that Crookfoot does when she fixes me square on. A look Catherine would have described as ‘old-fashioned’. Then a week or two later the horrible growths on his feet were gone, and he’d slimmed down and was more mobile, if not more graceful. Then, this week, the lump on his beak has dried out and gone, leaving just a scarred patch.

The Beak is Back!

He’s now a ferociously driven young bird, full of testosterone and noise, doing very nicely thank you. Which is very touching, and a miracle unexpected.

Oh, and I’m engaged by the way.

To be married.

Which is quite a surprise.

It’s a very Harry met Sally tale. We’ve known each other twenty-two years, and met when we were both married. Since then we’ve both been divorced, remarried and divorced again. Or in my case, widowed. And we’ve been closer in the last year or two again, but not expecting much more. Until about three months ago. When we were together ‘unchaperoned’ as my fiancée put it. Which apparently was the magic word. Because it was clear that that was what it took for the scales to fall from our eyes. Although, no doubt, Ellen was more aware of things than I. I am a man, after all.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and love and lust rekindled.

So this last weekend, after weeks of phone calls and tentative exploring of possible futures, including, perhaps, the likelihood of living ‘contiguously’ being discussed, we met again. And I proposed. And she accepted. Which is where the Beauty part comes in. Because she is very beautiful, and very wonderful, and I am madly in love with her. Green eyes and soft skin, dark hair and quite the figure.

And she smells wonderful.

And tastes even better.

And the whole world is changing very fast around us. My daughter, Ellen, will be 21 in three months, and will be setting up a home of her own. She announced to me that she has no desire to leave Brisbane, and won’t come to Canberra to live with us. Which, while obviously heartbreaking for a loving father such as myself, does mean that Ellen S, my intended, betrothed, soon-to-be-wife, and significant other and I will be able to live like newlyweds. So I’ll be moving to Canberra before the end of the year, to live happily ever after, and write and write and write.

By the way, did I mention I’m in love?

By the other way, in case you’re wondering, my daughter Ellen was in part named after Ellen S, my affianced. But this won’t cause as much confusion as you might think. Because I usually call Ellen (daughter of mine) Nell. Which, coincidentally is Ellen (my affianced’s) grown-up daughter’s name. But my daughter Nell spells it as Ellen backwards, that is, as Nelle. And Nell (my soon-to-be-daughter by marriage) is currently answering to Nellie. Which I haven’t called my (daughter) Nell in weeks.

So, couldn’t be simpler.

Except for my father, whose mother’s name was Ellen.

But he’s deaf in one ear.

Did I mention the ‘I’m in love’ thing?

~

Merlin's father.

Catherine's father.

The first time I ever laid eyes on the bastard was in a painting that was done not long after his funeral. I attended a meeting of the Labor Left faction one night in the winter of ’86. It was held in a long, concrete-walled conference room on the ground floor of the Allied’s union headquarters building in Red Hill. At one end of the room the entire wall was taken up with a mural showing all the wonders that unity of labour and trade-unionism could achieve, with particular emphasis on the Queensland that Bill Parris and the Allied had helped to build. It was, no doubt, one of those ‘art-in-working-life’ projects paid for by the Hawke Labor Government in the full flush of the high-spending years.

The mural was done in that peculiar ‘South-American revolutionary-naïve’ style that always makes me feel that the pre-schoolers have taken the nursery by storm with plastic bayonets and sickles, fresh from toil in the finger-painting fields and the plasticine mines. In the centre was a single figure, larger by far than all the rest, a tall, solidly built man with horn-rimmed glasses, iron grey hair and a dark, pointed beard, his hands raised in a gesture that was part liberation-theology Christ-like, part melodramatic music-hall magician. I had no idea who it was. I didn’t meet Catherine for another four years or so.

But the image stayed with me. It was so intensely religious, so genuinely iconic, yet at the same time without a real centre. He wasn’t a figure that held things together, or poured forth bounty from a cornucopia. He was the strange pseudo-Christ at the epicentre of a whirling chaos, and not the good kind that has beauty and underlying order and majesty. This was scattered and scatter-gunned. This was an explosion, destruction masquerading as creation. The figure in the centre sucked in power from all that appeared to come from him, undermining the meaning that was presumably intended.

It’s only in writing this that I’ve come to realise that the mural inspired a satirical character for a series of short stories I wrote later, during the time in the mid ‘90’s I worked for the Queensland Government, after Colleen had bent my head out of shape, and before Catherine and I moved in together.

The character was Shane Guevara, the artistic son of leftist South-American refugees who’d moved to Brisbane, and in particular to Logan City, a satellite town without an orbit, a cultural wasteland and economic sink-hole famous only for teenage pregnancy, petty crime and half-assed hot rods. Shane was a spray-painter with a strong ideological streak and a gift for the airbrush. A series of his best custom paint-jobs which larded the barebones plot were actually a series of extravagantly crafted in-jokes for those who had to suffer as a socially aware teenage boy during the 1970s in the land of Oz. They included the following:

"1976 Holden Monara, ‘Fall of Saigon’, 350 Chev, red and black, chrome sidepipes."

“Defeat of the Kuomintang” Mazda Bongo van, pale blue acrylic, 12 coats.

"William Morris Minor, 1100 cc, Paddy Hopkirk roll cage. Doilies everywhere."

1966 Ford Cortina, `Andreas Bader's Suicide', Holley 45, with extractors.

“Jane Fonda visits Hanoi as Barbarella”, 1972 Chrysler Valiant wagon, 245 hemi, bench seats, beige with matching trim.

Shane’s love interest was one Emily Wilding, a.k.a Em. A thin, passionate left-wing activist and vegetarian. Untidy dark hair, in a gamin 'Audrey Hepburn' cut that's grown out into a shoulder length straggle. Early 20's with green eyes, Em was a caricature of my own taste in women.

Em “rides a Vespa of indeterminate horsepower, and has an irrational fear of TAB outlets and bran mash. Is prone (sic) to throwing herself in front of things, police vans, local government. flunkies, lasagne.” All of which was an obscurantist clue as to the origins of her name. Emily Wilding Davison was the suffragette who famously threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, and died of her wounds four days later.

Part of Shane’s genesis came from my own time in some really terrible garage bands as a teenager. A good mate and rhythm guitarist was Andy Ball, a red-haired spray painter who had a mural of the Meatloaf ‘Bat out of Hell’ album cover painted on a dodgy Ford Escort panel van in which the gearstick would come out of the gearbox while you were driving. He later bought and painted a black Ford Falcon identical to the Mel Gibson ‘Mad Max’ car.

The creative process is a strange thing. I sometimes wonder if the mural is still there. In the past I’ve fantasised about visiting and defacing it, with paint stripper or just some heavy black enamel. I try not to think about it too much. Better to bury the bastard in words than to get busted for civil disobedience.

Beijing Rules

For those who want to know where they stand in Beijing:

You don't stand, you kneel.




Smile, wave, murder millions.