Out t’back

I’ve fallen in love with Australia again. Like someone you don’t want to/can’t marry but can’t walk away from. Lucky me, I don’t have to.

So yesterday I headed further in, to the big empty west. From the train (perfect transport), I watched the rainy green fields round Bathurst give way to scrubbier bush under thin clouds until everything gave way to dirt and sky. Look:

At Ivanhoe and beyond we saw emus prancing prehistorically (refraining here from posting blobs in mid distance). Small bouncing animals turned out to be goats and there were unfamiliar roo breeds in all directions.

Then further into desert, until sunset over Menindee lake, full of water this year, after many dry.

Bliss.

(well not only bliss: no cabs at Broken Hill meant walking for 40 minutes uphill through strange dark streets till I found my allotted bed).

Return of the non-native

Back in Australia for a week now and it feels so easy. Like I just walked through a door in Yorkshire and sat down to tea with an old friend.

Which of course edits out the long hours of missed connections, rerouted luggage, emergency shopping, trips back for cases and last minute cramped airline seats. Maybe it’s like childbirth, you just forget the painful bits.

So it seems seamless, going straight from Sydney airport to Sandy’s front room, which is full of old mates and warm conversations – about everything. Heart feels full of friendship.

Sunday morning I catch up with other friends in Katoomba, talk about writing over lunch with Elizabeth and check into the grand  Hydro Majestic. This is the view from my window:

The weather is wet and cool but the mountains emerge from the mist on Monday and I manage to get to Pulpit rock and Perry’s lockdown without a drenching.

Visits to  favourite cafes for meals with mates in Wentworth Falls, Mellow Bath, Blackheath. A child giggles for joy at the next table and everyone smiles. It is a pleasure being at home here but I don’t regret leaving

Landing

It’s six months since I left Australia – though Australia hasn’t left me, and probably won’t. Haven’t written any entries since Dubai. Too shellshocked by hemispheric upheaval/new job/old house full of other people’s debris/living out of suitcases for two months then blocked in by boxes when everything arrived in Leeds. But it’s probably time to wrap up this blog. I wanted to share the experiences – good and bad – of relocating across the planet when not in first flush of youth.

The following are notes on returning to previous location but not previous life (The Shock of the Old?). Some are captured before Brexit vote, some after (e.g. What have I DONE???).

• I’m driving up the M1 in my hired car and I can’t remember the speed limit.
• Got lost twice today in Leeds visiting old friend – roads are familiar so I stay on them, but expected roundabouts fail to materialise.
• After some years of ‘fancy a coffee/movie/meal today?’, it’s back to ‘ are you free in a fortnight’s time?’
• Newscasters and reporters have aged – men more than women probably because they wear less make up.
• Nicholas Parsons is STILL on radio 4  – but I can’t remember the schedule any more, so don’t know how to avoid him.
• All the shops are part of chains & franchises – only independent retail seen today in Leeds far was the great Jumbo records, still going
• But Huddersfield has cool indie coffee shops (#northernteahouse) and Sowerby Bridge has good food. I go for drives and am happy to eat alone – another legacy.

Everything looks strange – my anthropological eye is now cast homewards. This is exhausting so I spend  lot of time in my hotel room, asleep.

Then I move back into my old and much missed home, but it isn’t mine. Every cupboard is full of tenants toothbrushes, discarded duvets, old cutlery.There’s a gnome in the garden. I remember another life in that house, but it is a long time ago and I seem to be haunting it. Things improve when the stuff I shipped back arrives – nice pieces from the Blue Mountains – and I start fitting the Australian and Yorkshire parts of the jigsaw together.Six months on and there are still a lot of boxes to unpack, but no rush. Things also get better when friends come to stay and I recall that home consists of people not things.

The UK I have returned to is changed – 5 years of Coalition then Tory Government – creating a particularly cruel, vindictive use of benefits system to punish the poorest and most needy.  I don’t think Australians would allow this to happen (to non-Aboriginals anyway). They still have a public sector, and trade unions. UK has voted to leave Europe, having already sold its heritage to corporate speculators and hedge fund bankers. The place is full of toxic fantasies. Back to Blighted.

But I do like the bustle, the full trains, the coffee shops at every corner, the new M&S food hall at the bottom of my road. And I like the variety of human beings that surround me, in shops, trains and – a real contrast – work. So many non-white faces at last. It’s also brilliant that London is a train ride away, Spain a short haul flight. I can pop round for tea with my dad, find my place in the family again, while I slowly reconnect with old friends, whose lives have also changed in the past five years. There have been births, deaths, divorces, moves of all kinds. Lots of catching up to do.

The main thing, though, has been getting to grips with the new job. As usual when life feels chaotic, I turn to work as my anchor. Six months on, this has been a good call – my ideas and contribution are valued and I work with several talented senior women at Huddersfield Uni. There have been some teething problems with rooms and so on but I haven’t felt gender-conscious since I got back to UK. It’s a bigger relief than I expected. Seriously, Australia, you really need to make better use of your very fine females. Even the nice guys are in the way. I miss my lovely women friends, Bernadette, Jo-Anne, Michelle, Jane….

I miss the sounds ALL the time – the kookaburra dawn chorus, possums on the roof, the magpie arpeggios. I notice every gum tree (one, rather forlorn, at the back of my Leeds house and a beauty in Spain). I corner Antipodean friends and colleagues at conferences, parties, anywhere, to talk about the place. No-one here knows or cares that much. One person sneered that Australia didn’t even have a decent mountain range; I pointed out that it was so old a land mass, they had been eroded.

But then I didn’t know how old the land was until I got there and it told me. You feel it all the time, this ancient presence, just waiting, sometimes welcoming, sometimes shrugging us off. You can feel your feet sinking in – if you want to.  I have left but not forgotten. Australia introduced me to geological time.

Now Europe looks so young, with all its pointy bits still sharp and edgy. All the workable land is worked and has been for thousands of years, unlike the vast emptiness of Australia. Took a visiting prof with a farming background over the Yorkshire moors and he could see how many farms there were occupying space that would have been one maybe two stations back home. The land here tells of lords and peasants, strip farming, inheritance law and people striving to feed themselves over millennia. It’s just a different story.

I guess that’s my conclusion – everything is altered by the experience of living in Australia. What was familiar is no longer, but then its new strangeness has a new wonder. At first I wasn’t sure about going back, it’s not something I do much. Now I can see I haven’t gone back, but forward.

 

Leaving Australia 1

Started this two weeks ago, feels inadequate already, as deeper feelings about leaving Oz surface, but, for the record (and with more pix to come) …….

 

Sitting in Dubai airport cum space station, digesting the fact that, after four and half years, I no longer live in Australia. Fewer than five years, but this time has had such an impact. Will take me more time, more words to understand how much it has changed me, but here’s a first stab at what I will miss, in no particular order

Coffee – flat white here is quite different from its pale, late imitations. On a trip to New Zealand recently, I learned that NZ is home of the FW – or so they claim. The cafe at Sydney airport where I would gasp for real coffee after 30 hours of airline chemicals….  Luckily, I plan to spend time in Spain whose café con leche rules supreme.

Sydney festivals – I didn’t make Mardi Gras, but went to Sydney Vivid several times – the best illuminated buiildings I’ve ever seen. The exuberance and playfulness seemed to sum up something very Sydney-ish. Loved the Writers Festival too, great setting on the harbour, interesting speakers, large literary crowds. Talking of harbour faves – Grilled

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Barra and chips sitting looking out  at the sun setting across the Harbour. Watching La Traviata performed on a pontoon on the Harbour, with fireworks and flying foxes accompanying the arias in the dusk

 

Australian journalism – the ABC broadcasts current affairs, investigations, media analysis and Any Questions discussion panel across prime time Monday nights. Puts BBC shoving journalism out of the way in favour of Come dancing or whatever to shame. SBS broadcasts a range of shows to engage and reflect the range of cultures in contemporary Australia – reminds me a little of early channel 4. Both channels are largely in public ownership.

Public ownership – as are the trains (about a fiver for 200 kms from regional NSW to Sydney); utilities (not all), roads, and much more. This leads to a mix of low costs and irritating obstacles (imposisble to access outside working hours). Trade unions still determine conditions for most workers. Pensions funds are obligatory and employers make substantial contributions (17% in my own experience!!)

Language – finally realised that Australians speak Tabloidese – fitting as Murdoch’s birthplace. – love the Rego/servo/arvo/doco compressions. Also everyday use of more arcane language, so that rort is a common verb for scam or fraud, as in ‘pollies rorting expenses’.

Now the big ones: living quite differently in and on the land, and making friends far from home.

I want to write something substantial about how the Australian land has changed me, so will not say much here, except that the wildness of this continent generates an inner freedom to which I have responded deeply. Two years in the Blue Mountains have given me audio memories of the Kookaburra dawn chorus. Night skies that reach down to the rooftops in regional cities. The unfamiliar language of trees, not symmetrical, not shapely, the magnificent scruffy gum trees that scent the world. The light, shooting everything in HD, each leaf visible across distances.

People

Nothing is impossible but it seems unlikely I will work again with such a creative bunch of colleagues – the location of my discipline (public or organisational communication) in a creative rather than business school meant I shared corridors with performers, writers and directors. People interested in bodies as well as brains, like the lovely Dan Aubin,  handstanding past my office door, an image that sums up SCCI at its best (pic to follow).

 

Bowie blues

Apologies to Robin Williams fans but while I was sad at his death I did not feel remotely caught up in the grief wave. Admittedly, I did weep through Diana’s funeral service so I’m not immune to these things. On the whole, I think of myself as pretty cool with mortality – it goes with the territory. But Bowie’s death has reordered my landscape in ways I do not understand – hence this exploration.

So much has been written by others – including some rather nasty sneering at grievers. As if those who are sad are comparing themselves to Bowie’s family and friends! Of course fans engage with the image not the reality of the person – and no one plays as profoundly with the performed self as Ziggy/Thin White Duke etc. I love Suzanne Moore’s comment that she pretended not to recognise the actual man when she met him, to preserve the internal icon (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/13/dont-deride-those-mourning-david-bowie-this-grief-serious-and-rational).

I am not in the UK and have not been trawling the comments sections of such articles, though I note I am still reading one or two pieces about Bowie’s ‘meaning’ each day. Perhaps to help explain the continued heaviness of his sudden absence. After this week’s reflection, I suspect that it is his exploration of the constructed self that moves me so strongly and has since I first saw him, still David Jones, miming at the London Arts Lab. And of course he is part of my young life: those summer student days in Whitstable rolling endless spliffs on the cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy and the Spider from Mars, while the vinyl wore thin on the turntable; the countless viewings of Roeg’s The Man who fell to Earth; my thin body in its big linen suit rejoicing to Let’s Dance. In my teens, twenties and thirties, I too was torn between alien and human, trying to find a place on the planet.

I have to eliminate other allures, which I know have influenced friends – I was not a young gay man on a culture-free housing estate to whom Bowie offered the artist’s way. I grew up with painters, actors and jazz musicians – ours was a bohemian hothouse, so it was obvious I would be a writer or some kind of artist. It took time to realise that posing and treating existential angst with alcohol was not the same as actually writing, painting or playing something. I was better playing than being an artist.

Bowie was the real thing and this is what he means to me – he let himself blaze into his full potential, though his lyrics show the doubt never left him. His vision of himself, an always changing, ever-evolving musician and visual artist, was stronger than disapproval, ridicule or even years of substance abuse. He kept trying out different versions of himself until he found something which felt comfortable. This is my connection. This week his departure reminds me of the selves I have – and, crucially, haven’t – occupied, the struggle to disappear so that the not-self can simply be. His death day was also my 64th birthday – five years!

I love the recent albums now, and listen to Heathen, The Next Day and others all the time, hearing the maturity, love and gentleness expand without any loss of curiosity or daring. And now we have Blackstar, an exquisite, heartbreaking, leave-taking. At the end of his bold life, he creates a bolder death.

The opinion columns accuse people who express their grief publicly of narcissism and I accept the charge – though I also believe that artists find the universal through exploration of their own experience, seeking just such resonance. Bowie’s music, his self-creations and now his elegant death resonate with me, along with millions and millions of others. As Annie Lennox says, “Our personal and collective landscape has changed and we’re trying to come to terms with it”.

(painterskeyes.com)

 

 

Up Top

Loving my London break: in last couple of days I’ve been to one of the most important exhibitions ever, the Royal Academy retrospective of Ai Wei Wei’s work, which combines ancient Chinese craft work, such as joinery, metal work and hand carved marble with powerful political comment, making works that are both beautiful and angry.

   
    
  

I’ve also satisfied a long held wish to see Simon Russell Beale on the stage, in a thoughtful funny play about the creation of the Theatre Royal Haymarket, in which we watched it: http://www.mrfootesotherleg.com

  
 
Tonight, did the full red carpet trip for European premiere of Quentin Tarantino ‘s Hateful Eight at Leicester Square Odeon, followed by Q&A with man himself and cast. Operatically bloody and magnificent. 

  

Farewell Blue Mountains

Last night in my Blue Mountains home – the owners want to sell so there’s a rather brutal 90-day notice routine. I hereby vow to talk to my tenants in Leeds before issuing any eviction orders. As a result, I’m moving at the end of a killing teaching session, completely exhausted by the technical and administrative demands of a 250-student subject with complex teaching arrangements, on campus and online, multiple staff and loads of new technology.  Too old for this lark.

Feels like a series of endings heading my way: having to leave has thrown ‘what am I doing here?’ back into sharp relief. A few weeks ago, a really nasty crash into leaping kangaroos on a mountain bend in the dark killed the roo, did nearly $10k of damage to the car and disrupted the well being I had enjoyed here until then. Impossible not to reflect that the kangaroo was just being itself; it’s the road that’s the intrusion. So the move closer to work will at least leave roos one car freer to roam at peace.

And while I already feel the loss of the dawn across the ridge, watching the sun, moon and stars from my beautiful brass bed, it was very helpful to learn from a friend that Aboriginal people never lived in the mountains: you go there to heal not stay. Time to move on.

Naturally, I’m writing this instead of packing. I tend to rely on magic – or my sister – to complete a move. After days and days of putting things in boxes, the removal van always arrives to a place that shows no sign of departure. Just a bit messier than usual. So heartfelt thanks to friends who came to the rescue in the week and just got on with the tasks that paralysed me.

Somehow, by this time tomorrow most of my stuff will be back in Bathurst – including furniture from local antique shops which I’d like to come with me wherever I go. Travelling heavy, as usual. My most loved books and prints, shipped over from UK only a year ago,  now back in boxes for who knows how long.

This was my Australian home and and I thank the trees for their fine company.

Belated Bali pix

Belated pix from mid-term break to Bali. 

Bali was bustlier than I’d imagined, but I came to like that liveliness – streets packed with scooters, slow traffic jams, taxis that hail you with horn beeps, whether you want one or not. Then cut away from the main drag and it all stops…..

Spent a lovely day exploring temples, rain forests and the interior, including a taste of the famous poo coffee. 

– caught dawn at one coast and sunset at another.

The Natural Way of Things

So.. finished Charlotte Wood’s new novel … and need to share something.

I was thrilled to pick up a copy at last week’s launch

and have been gingerly consuming it since. I thought it would be an all-nighter, but in fact it required slow, measured digestion: it’s a rich brew. Like Verla testing the mushrooms for death caps, you have to be careful. The thing with real writing is that you can’t stand outside it, looking in. I normally race through novels and most leave little trace. The Road is still with me, indelible, from recent years, and Michel Faber’s Book of Strange New Things. What else? Perhaps Charlotte’s book has just wiped my literary memory. The point is that her writing is so exact, so physical, that racing is not really an option. You have to taste the bitter weeds.

Others have summarised the situation – this review from the SMH, for example: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-natural-way-of-things-by-charlotte-wood-a-novel-born-from-anger-20150922-gjrmhs.html

and other have pinpointed the exquisite prose: http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/09/24/the-natural-way-of-things-by-charlotte-wood/

I only have two things to add. As the book unfolded, it seemed to me that it was a story about bodies. Who owns them, internally and externally. The men owning the women’s bodies, unquestioningly; the women drugged or co-opted into compliance. But the women are absent from their own bodies too, at first, during abuse, and perhaps not only then. Yolanda’s story is one of occupation, first by others, then, slowly, by herself, her meat self, and finally beyond bodies into the merged animal world. Verla protects the object of her continuing affection, the one who brought her body into vivid reality, by hating others, until that comfort is removed and her body is understood as the screen of male desire, the empty space for his longing. While there are no Aboriginal characters, echoes of Terra Nullius, forced removals, and the colonised body are strongly present.

As I said earlier this is an astonishingly physical book – the women’s bones are broken, bodies are burnt, they bleed, suppurate, vomit and fart. Once in a very rare while, they sing. Simple physical existence become the overwhelming imperative as the book unfolds  – but that too is seen from different perspectives. Yolanda becomes Diana the Hunter, others form grooming pods (sprouting pubic hair is as shocking to the perpetually waxed as is was to John Ruskin). The embodied, grounded detail demands your absolute attention, moving beyond the particular.

I remember finishing the Women’s Room when it came out and the plummeting recognition of how patriarchy co-opts women. This book shows the choices available to women, from collusion to despair to resistance: it’s a bleak, narrow spectrum. I know Verla too well, unable to bear the indifference of her beloved, telling stories of matching grief until they can no longer be sustained.

My other observation – and it’s been made by most reviewers – is the detailed engineering of every single sentence. I suspect this is only possible if the writer is so immersed in the book’s reality that only this noun, that adverb will suffice. Several reviewers have mentioned that is an angry book – as if a book about the abuse and detention of women could not be – but I wonder if it is the control of language which indicates this rage, rather than the stories. The very punctuation becomes an act of defiance, of reclamation.

A rich, bloody, rabbit stew that you have to catch and skin for yourself. Read.

Strayla Day

January 26 is Australia Day, the anniversary of the first European settlers arrival. In other words, it commemorates the last five – white –  minutes of Australian history and disregards the rest. Following the universal general degradation of patriotism to nationalism, it has been co-opted to privilege one version of history over all others. I thought this cartoon about the call on the populace to stop what they’re doing and sing the national anthem at noon was satirical. I was wrong.

First Dog cartoon

And then this morning, heard that the top Australian honour has gone to Prince Philip. Honest. Thank God that these things are handled so ineptly they feed the opposition.

BUT, but but. Something is changing in me and this seems as good as any a day to record it. For example, this is the first post in months, because I no longer experience Australia as a visitor; it’s where I live and work. I’m not really Down Under any more, just here.

I also noticed in my recent role as tourist guide and fellow adventurer with my sister, Kate,  on her first visit here over Xmas, I kept saying ‘we do this, we do that, here’. Seeing the now-familiar through her eyes was also instructive, and this post is about some of those observations (pt1).

Kate arrived with a foot infection that worsened over several days, leading to multiple interactions with pharmacists and eventually (successfully) the Emergency Room – every single person was so kind, concerned, helpful and warm. And I felt proud! You can, of course, still find this generosity in the UK, especially in the north of England and outside major cities, but it struggles against the pressures of business and rotten wages and the long years of austerity which have barely touched Australia despite various pleas to tighten belts.

I also had a great time doing touristy things that turned out to not so touristy after all. I assumed Katoomba’s  Scenic World would be some kind of sub-Disney tat, but it was brilliant. The thrill seekers took the funicular down and made their way briskly to the Up transport, abandoning the temperate rainforest of the valley floor for us to explore. The interwoven strands of roots and 19th C mining cables were poignant, like traces of a lost civilisation, which I suppose they are.

Admittedly the Jenolan Caves did look more like Disneyworld, on the surface at least, with a kind of Tyrolean look that seemed tenuously connected to the site and its Indigenous stories. But once underground, the magic was way beyond Walt’s imagination, with delicate organic structures as mysterious and beautiful – and old – as this land. Like a visit to the body of the Earth, folded and dark. The guide told the origin stories with such feeling our group of gawkers fell silent and let the tale seep into us like the crystal drips we could hear in the background. And then we emerged to the Blue Lake and fell silent again.

Jenolan Caves

caves

Blue Lake