memory | Phillipa Fioretti

Writer Goes On Holiday

January 8th, 2010

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I was trailing through a huge limestone cave complex the other day. I shuffled along at the back of the group who were eagerly lapping up the guide’s talk. I was filled with curmudgeonly thoughts along the lines of, ‘Ooo, look over there, an exciting stalactite. Not.’ And, ‘I wish that person behind me would stop breathing so heavily.’

Maybe I’ve been in too many – I’m a jaded habitué of limestone caves - maybe marvelling at a hole in the earth is just not my thing and it’s time I face up to it. As a kid my parents dragged me through these caves, I went on school excursions to the caves and now it seems only fair that I inflict caves on my own offspring

As I gazed with lacklustre eyes at the thirteenth rock formation shaped like Mickey Mouse’s nose (and look over there, it’s Minnie!) I wondered what would make the excursion interesting for me - apart from a fight breaking out among the group or the lights failing – and suddenly perked up when the guide began to speak of the first Europeans to enter the cave. He spoke of two local men, schoolteachers, discovering the entrance to the cave in the eighteen twenties and going in with only candles, and by the time the eighteen fifties came along both men and women were exploring with candles and ropes, and then as they became a little more familiar with the cave layout they began to picnic in there and bring in musical instruments and moved onto string quartets and then a full orchestra and dances under the huge archway outside. Now this got my attention.

The road to this cave complex is difficult even for modern cars – steep, narrow, winding, long drops into the valley below and yet these people would come to these caves, presumably in their cumbersome clothes, women in corsets, numerous petticoats, hats, buttoned up sleeves and so on, on wagons drawn by horses, no way of cooling or preserving their food - and they had fun. Well, you have to presume they did because they kept coming. And as usual, I think of the women and their conditions. Tight corsets laced at the back might be a novelty these days, something for your partner to unlace with his teeth, but even tight jeans can ruin a whole day for me.

These people were far more interesting to me than the cave structure. I found myself looking around and trying to imagine what they were thinking - did the enormous physical effort to get here dampen their enthusiasm? Were there any family groups? Were there any unresolved tensions in the group? Crushes, love affairs, rivalries, antagonisms? Did anyone smother the urge to push another into a crevasse? And what did they see with their candles?

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I was with a group of primarily European tourists with very fancy cameras who took pictures of everything. As the only Australians in the group we stood out because we leaned on the rails whenever we could and didn’t take pictures. My mind wandered back to the present and I speculated on these photos. What were they going to do with their photos when they got home? Who would they show them to? Did they have anyone who’d be interested enough?

It was the people rather than the cave that entranced me – and that’s what I suspect most novelists get excited about – people and characters and why they are doing what they are doing, and what would happen if a six metre cockroach scuttled through the cave – who would take charge, who would scream and who would photograph it and then scream?

Earlier that same week I had an arrangement that required me to wait for some friends for an hour and a half in a cinema foyer. Concerned for my boredom threshold they offered to change things, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I was secretly pleased in fact. One and a half hours in a cinema lobby watching people and daydreaming is a great opportunity for some quality notebook time. If my friends had asked me to wait in a big empty limestone cave maybe I’d have a problem. But I soon would have peopled it in my imagination, constructed scenarios for them and be panting with eagerness to write it all down when I got back to my study.

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Categories: culture, on writing | Tags: creativity, culture, memory, writing | 4 Comments

‘Deep and Dissolving Verticals of Light’

October 6th, 2009

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When I was a child, sometimes my mother would drive us to Mosman where we’d catch the ferry to the city from Mosman Wharf. I remember watching the ferry approaching through the scattered sail boats – the ferry master would cut the engines, drift toward the wharf and then thrust the engines into reverse, the water boiled and churned, the smell of diesel filling the air, and as the ferry slammed into the wooden pylons the whole wharf shuddered. The wharfies’ jumped from ferry to wharf, sometimes two or three feet, depending on how many admiring girls were watching. They’d have fags in their mouths and looks of studied nonchalance as they hooked ropes thick as my leg over the metal hooks welded to the wharf.

The barnacle crusted wooden pylons continued to groan and the wharfies’ slapped down the gangplank, and got on with looking distant and muscular. The gangplank was maybe two feet wide with a flimsy metal rail on one side. My mother would take my arm and steer me across as I dallied and stared in fascination down into the churning, oily water.

My cousin - who could chew gum and laugh at the same time, which was very cool - once told me of a woman who’d jumped from the ferry to the wharf, before the gangplank went down, with a baby in her arms. She missed the wharf and fell in the water. She held the baby up and begged horrified onlookers to take it – just before she was crushed between the ferry and the pylon. Guts everywhere, my cousin assured me.

The Manly ferry to the city is a longer journey than the Mosman ferry and can get quite exciting for children, or anxiety prone adults. The ferry has to pass the opening of the harbour to the Pacific Ocean between North and South Heads. The ocean swell can sometimes be so large the ferry is thrown from side to side and everyone screams and the ferry master has to tack into the waves and you think he’s gone mad and is heading toward the rocks and we’ll all have to jump and swim for it and there are sharks in Sydney harbour because my cousin said there was and we’ll be dashed to pieces on the rocks anyway so who cares?

These days the new ferries have electronically controlled gangplanks, very few wharfies and are designed to cope with the odd spot of foul weather. So where’s the fun?

Those memories of the harbour crossings, the fogs and the buoys bobbing, the gulls and the white bow waves, the salt and diesel lodge in my mind, never to be erased. So when our high school English teacher introduced us to the poetry of Kenneth Slessor, in particular his poem Five Bells, I remember being entranced by it.

It was my ferry he was writing about. The one I caught. He saw the same water, the same gulls flying along behind, the same white bow water and he must have sat on the deck, like me, as the ferry rounded Bradley’s Head and suddenly the Harbour Bridge is there and you have to decide which side of the ferry you want to sit on. Do you watch the city or the zoo side?

Slessor’s poem is about a lost friend who fell off the Manly ferry one night and drowned in the harbour. The drowned man was a writer and journalist, and on his way to a party he had stuck a bottle of beer in each coat pocket and must have been sucked down very quickly. How many bones lie at the bottom of the harbour, I wondered as I read the poem? Does that now grown baby wonder about his/her mother’s fate beneath the oily waters? Can they bear to go back to that wharf? That’s if it was true. My cousin also told me about a man in her street who captured children and kept them in cages in his back yard.

The poem has travelled with me over the years. I still love it. I love these following lines so much that if I ever had the urge to tattoo myself it would be with those words.

I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,

The poem conjures up smells and emotions and images from my childhood experiences of the harbour. It binds me to that place and that time and it lives in me.

Cremorne Ferry

This phenomenon may not be a marketable commodity, it does nothing to lower or raise prices, it contributes nothing to the national economy, but it enriches me as a human to have my experiences reflected like that. I wonder if the Honourable Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs has ever had a similar experience. If he could dwell on it for a while it may slow him down in his campaign to lift PIR’s. One of the consequences of doing this would be to flood the small Australian market with cheap copies of American and British books, making Australian books uncompetitive in terms of sales.

If it goes ahead, who will write our stories and our poems? More to the point who will publish them? Will we experience our everyday lives and make sense of them through stories that have nothing to do with us? It’s like the fake snow at Christmas, take it away and get rid of it, it has nothing to do with the Australian experience.