Inconsequential deceit

Protecting yourself, with a numbing high, that trips you over lower than the pavement. The limits and boundaries opened with the flying, blur with the fall, and carnivorously rip precious flesh out of you.

Lower than the silence and emptiness after the soaring magic festival you put your guard up to, could have ever felt. 

And when you stop that high. And quit those lows. You never look back and want it. Dark self-loathing regret that you ever consented to the deceptively temporary anaesthetic. You don't even remember signing the form.

But the festival... even in the solitude of the aftermath, when you wished the gates were never closed, the jumping castles and jam donut vans were never packed away... you could have smiled about. And been grateful for. Because the music is still in your head to dance to. 

That's the difference with loving.

Green brooches in a labyrinth

We needed to get changed for dinner. Alex and Mim were waiting there when we arrived. But I took longer this time. I answered differently when asked where I had been. Astro was with me. Mim had had her dress made. She had many more dresses. She said she was a princess of sorts and she said I must be feeling great to walk beside her. She had been putting on my dresses and looking better in them. Brown, taller and lean. Each month. I wanted a tutu. I didn’t want to be compared, I didn’t want to compare myself. She kept swooping in like I had lined it all up, and came in and took it. She changed the story and my story and she took all my friends and contacts.

But she was nice as I arrived. They could overhear us talking.

The closer it came to the time, the more likely it was you would disappear. I stepped into the drain and it was your mind.

I was with two women, they knew my Gran. Going around maze that was Astro’s mind, I kept finding his black and white drawings. The women were looking for somewhere to change, but it kept getting darker and more filled with people. We were trying to move faster, but every time we took a step, we stepped down onto more steps or rocks and I would be thankful I didn’t just jump. Though I wondered if I had of just jumped if it would have been flat. The maze was forming as we moved, the ground creating itself to meet us. Was I creating the steps by not leaping with faith onto a flat landing? Or was that just because it was dark and it was all that we could do to see in front of us and the rest was already there, so it just seemed it was being created as we went.  More and more people were arriving and the types of people were changing. They were angry, frustrated many of them.

And then we saw her, in agony. And the blood. On the ground. But some coming from her chest and then in a line down. The old ladies left to go and get help, even though they had already called the ambulance. They didn’t speak to her. Her name was Sophie. She didn’t want to tell me her surname. She had a phone. She didn’t want me to call her husband or anyone yet. Her husband’s name was Peter Green. She had been three months pregnant. She lived in Bairnsdale. She whispered this. Even though she could talk.

The ambulance came. I still had her phone. I needed to get it to her. Everyone was on their way to her room. They wanted to examine her quickly so they could get out of there and collect their Easter chocolate and exam marks. They wanted to quickly get the story about how the hospital was negligent. It wasn’t. Had to get her phone to her and warn her before they got there. A man with a ginger beard was leading me in different directions, up different stairwells. No short-cuts, but it was designed to confuse the chasers.

Made it to the top. Tried to call Peter Green.

The dressmaker only just noticed. The grass green shimmer on the fabric, did not match the flat forest green. I didn’t know anything about sewing. Not really. But I couldn’t help but step in. Like the lady looking for the native animal brooches – I knew I’d seen them somewhere before and it would have been remiss of me not to mention it. It was an hour before our conversation finished.  The dressmaker was worried what the princess Mim would say. I showed her how the bright grass green popped more when bordered by the forest green. It could definitely work.

I showed him how to play volleyball. He was only small. I wanted to get him a softer ball. The other girl in the class recounted her dream – a similar story. And in both, the balls became axes or other weapons. And the children knew how to use them. They were scared. And needed to defend themselves. They had seen too much. I don’t like volleyball.

There's a Rosella under my Umbrella..under my Umbrella..ah, ah, ah...

This is a story about the time I slept with a bird and my Mum put my sister in her handbag for a week.

The two wooden rosellas on a perch, dangling off some fishing wire, were a gift from some cousins. We named them after those cousins and hooked them up over the kitchen sink, overlooking the backyard. Their job was to ‘spy’ on whatever mischief my sister and I might be up to and report back to Mum. 

Later, maybe a couple of decades later, I was up way too early one morning. Wandering towards the beach I noticed a small technicolour little flapper on the tram line. It wasn’t moving and a tram was clicking towards it. I shooed it, whistled at it, but it still wouldn’t move! There was nothing else to be done but pick it up. It pecked at me incessantly as its feet gripped my finger. 

Into the 7/11 I went and asked for a box. I took it down to the foreshore and put it in a tree, but it just stared at me blankly. If I left it there it was only a matter of time before a cat made breakfast of it. Maybe that’s why my step-father shoots the feral cats. 

And neither was the wildlife rescue service, apparently. So we walked. The bird stopped biting me. I took it for coffee. I took it to the park. We had a chirp and a chat. It sat on my shoulder. I tried to let it go on an oval and teach it to fly. But it just hopped after me. This wasn’t going well. I was closer to Dalton’s house than my own by now. I’ll just go there with the bird, I thought. 

Dalton (named like the china, but nothing as fine as china) wasn’t there. His housemate let me in and went to work and I thought I’d just chill with my multi-coloured friend until Dalton came back, or until I came up with a better plan. I was very sleepy, and I couldn’t just put the bird out in the backyard to be shredded to pieces by feline fangs. So I hopped into Dalton’s bed for a snooze and the Rosella hopped in with me.

Unsurprisingly, he was not so impressed when he came home to find a bird in his bed. Which I thought was a bit harsh. But I was okay, I had bigger Rosella things to worry about. And it was probably a good indicator of future lack of compatibility. He said I could sleep in the bed but the bird had to go.* 

Last week, my Mum came to visit. I let her loose in my eclectically spaghetti sprawled little suburb for a couple of hours and she came back from the op-shop with some ornamental birds – two blue budgerigars and a rosella. We named the rosella after my sister, who lives in New Zealand. She came in my Mum’s handbag with us for the week and we positioned her in places for photos wherever we went, pretending my sister was with us. On the beach, in the car, out for coffee, at the dinner table.

I have a cousin who once called to say her fish tank was full of tears and had spilt into the back of her car and it was flooding. A wasp was also talking to her. We sent her a photo of the rosella. She loved it. The people who don't understand normal, often understand the most absurd. Which rhymes with bird.

Even when it feels like the heavy night won’t lift and will make your legs collapse from beneath you, you can put a rosella in your handbag. Sometimes there’s nothing more to do than hop into bed with a bird**, and laugh at yourself so hard you fall off your perch.***

*The rosella eventually went to the vet

** By bird, I do not mean a female. But if there are two consenting adults, then that is okay too.

***Not in the metaphorical dying sense.

A Dreaming about Rosella is one of tragedy which triumphs with love as the ultimate victor.  A couple run away together; although she is promised to a wirrinin (magic man) who wreaks his revenge and kills her man.  She is so in grief the jealous wirrinin goes to strike her.  The Great Spirit intervenes and she is instantly transformed into the first Rosella.  She then flies off to the Land of the Dead to reach her lover before he crosses into it.  In a race against time, she reaches him.  Today, Rosellas still mate for life. Rosellas embody eternal love.

Teaching by Humiliation

Inspired by an epiphany from a friend and palliative doctor after watching this Ted Talk by Monica Lewinsky on the Price of Shame.

I keep leaving the house naked. I turn up to work, to lunch, to classes, parties, the gym, exams, weddings and funerals without a thread of clothing on. I'm no nudist. This is not by choice. I desperately want to be covered. I leave the house and it is not until I am already there and I can't go back that I realise my entire self is exposed and everyone is staring at me in shock, disgust and disappointment. They must see me as other to prevent them from seeing themselves and not just eliminate me, but make an example of me. Sometimes I am laughed at. Sometimes those I respect and love the most turn away from me. Sometimes I am raped. Duck and dodge as I might, lower my volume, do anything to distract attention from me - there's nowhere to hide. There is no hole to sink into. There is no one walking towards me with open arms and a pair of pants.

I'm vulnerable. I'm naked. I'm on a public stage with all of me bared. All of it ridiculed. In the minds of others, I am less than.

I'm humiliated.

It's a recurring dream. We've all had it. And that speaks volumes.

But if I coach my dream self to be more resilient, to be able to stand naked in front of a crowd and be proud will this solve the problem? No. I am still not safe. Someone else will have the same dream, maybe even on the same night.

Someone else will have their private stories, relationships, mistakes and conversations splashed across the internet; another politician will be laughed at and scorned not because of the values and intellect of their policy but because of a exhaustion-driven misnomer in their speech, their hair, their extramarital affairs, their human desires and flaws; another child will disengage from learning and skip class to avoid having their perceived stupidity exposed; another young man will have his self-esteem and self-respect further degraded in a court room and a news article; a medical intern will overdose after months or years of feelings of inadequacy; another woman will be raped; another genocide will occur.

A study by psychologists in Amsterdam recorded people reading scenarios that evoked humiliation, anger, or happiness and used electrophysiological measures of cognitive intensity to determine a level of perceived negative affect. Levels were markedly increased in humiliation scenarios. At most, it suggests humiliation as an emotion, is more powerful than happiness and anger. At least, it unveils the idea that humiliation is an intense experience, likely to have far-reaching consequences.

In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of massive genocide. At least 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed despite the presence of UN peacekeepers mandated to protect them. But it wasn't just a tragedy of elimination. It was more. Like all genocides and many cross-cultural conflicts, it is an agonising narrative of rape, torture, devaluing, dehumanisation, and - humiliation.

Would it have helped if Tutsi were more resilient? If they knew themselves better? That they contacted a mediator about being bullied and asked for support? They were. They are. They did.

We know that examining the behaviour and character of 'victims' of bullying and abuse only further portrays and reinforces their feelings of being a victim, of feeling weak and humiliated, of being powerless. Yet we continue to use this as a strategy for eliminating it. And so it continues. What is more, we often go as far as to investigate the behaviour of 'evil' people and contrast this with 'good' people.

"Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all....
You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;
For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.
And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also." - Kahlil Gibran, 'On Crime and Punishment'.

A pilot study published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2015  set its sites firmly on a culture of "teaching by humiliation". Final-stage medical students from two Australian medical schools were surveyed anonymously about their adult and paediatric clinical rotations.

The development of professionalism is a huge topic of interest in medical education and most often an explicit goal in curriculums. Yet 81 per cent of students surveyed reported witnessing teaching by humiliation in their adult rotations and 74 per cent reported experiencing it. Researchers claim it confirms findings of decades of research with medical students, in which up to 95 per cent reported experiencing teaching by humiliation.

The research identified forms of abuse ranging from derogatory remarks and undermining students' abilities and motivation, to verbal attacks. Students reported public belittlement, having their reputation or career threatened, experiencing unjustified criticism, sarcasm and teasing. They experienced medical staff deliberately withholding necessary information, ignoring students and setting impossible deadlines. Teaching practises have included humiliation, contempt, harassment, discrimination, assault, mocking and demeaning behaviour. Other subtle forms of abuse included refusal to answer questions, return calls or answer pagers and use of condescending language. Reports also described a misuse of the Socratic form of teaching, known as "pimping", in which teachers ask questions aggressively, putting students on the spot and shaming them.

The report comes in the same year ABC's Four Corners program rocked the hierarchial foundations of Australia's medical fraternity with its report 'At Their Mercy: The bullying and bastardisation of young doctors in our hospitals'.

The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons then released a report which shocked even the doctor who first raised these allegations. If found nearly half of all surgeons across all specialities have experienced discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment. It included stories of surgeons being expected to provide sexual favours in return for tutorship, constant belittling, intimidation and public humiliation.

If we are to produce the best doctors, they must receive optimal education, and this requires an environment free of fear and anxiety. Previous research has found teaching by humiliation affects students' mental health, having an impact on their confidence, loyalty to the profession and the care of patients. A United States study found mistreated medical students were more likely to be stressed, depressed and suicidal, to binge drink and believe the faculty did not care about them.

But this is not a case of some particular doctors just being bullies. It is a medical and hospital hierarchy; a culture of competitive education; an acceptance of disrespectful behaviour towards patients, staff and students; a respect for teaching by humiliation as a right of passage. Senior and junior doctors do what was done to them as students in order to "toughen up" the young.

Those who are bullies, those who are moderately evil and those who are extraordinarily evil, who participate in, initiate and organise everything from teaching by humiliation, to scandalous 'news' articles to genocide, cannot be distinguished from those who we perceive to be good, just by their actions.

Character and behaviour complement each other. But it is not a purely evil character, an individual, who commits these atrocities against other humans. It is the character of our culture, of our bystanders, our encouragers, our collective insecurities, our religions and spiritual awakenings, our universal strive for purity of mind and of human race.

Whatever the bullying, whatever the collective humiliation, it is fostered by a system and society that fosters rational self-interest, a culture of cruelty. There is group conformity, a rejection of individual identity and thus reduction of personal responsibility, disengagement from self and others, and finally, the merger of a person's role and perceived duty to some 'greater good' with their personal character. It is rooted in the identification of the victim as the 'other', an impurity upon the higher human cause, who can subsequently be delegitimised, dehumanised and blamed.

Genocide is not a quest for wealth or power. It is a quest for a pure conscience, for freedom and happiness, recognition from a divine higher power, and a willingness to sacrifice the self and the other in this 'virtuous' pursuit. The right to an autonomous self and the need to preserve this as a human right, leads to the right to destroy an 'other' autonomous self in defence. That is why extinction of a race is not enough. To destroy them we must first detach from them, see them as less than human. The loss of individual identity and personal responsibility through conformity and virtuous loyalty to the cause, goes hand-in-hand with a need to make an example of the other, to prove their world view and autonomy illegitimate, their humanness inhuman. This dehumanisation and objectification is what leads to assaults against sexuality, rape, mistreatment of corpses and denial of civilised burials.

To prevent this from happening, it is not evil people we must examine. It is not evil behaviour. It is good people. Good, ordinary people who are capable of committing genocide. Who are capable of publishing stories that humiliate others. Capable of reading them with fascination absent of compassion. Of putting aside another human's emotions and wellbeing with a self consciousness that the ends will justify the means. Who are capable of defending and protecting themselves against shame by using humour to humiliate others, or even to self deprecate themselves before someone else does. We must examine ordinary people, good people, who are bystanders, who condone this in their obedience, their apathy and their silence.

The Aristotlean theories on virtue, that value honour, reason, self sufficiency, the pursuit of self-satisfaction must be counteracted with a new wave. It must wash away self-interest and self-sacrificing values, and make way for a tsunami of culture that promotes empathy and compassion for one another, that recognises the other in herself and understands the need for a collective movement against human destruction of each other and the world we live in.

Qui tacet, consentire videtur

Your rudimentary

Has sedimentary

And we're all holding up the fort
Raising you up
To point our finger up at you
In guilty accusation.

The banality of commonality
Is not worth the laugh
You roll your eyes
At the expose
And say my heart is bleeding
Well yes it is.

His lunch money is nowhere
To be seen.
You've been seen
Pushing him over
When he tries to stand up
The smirk on your face
Is the joke we can't take.

There's nothing grotesque
About what's in your mirror
We're all to blame
I see you, he sees me, you see him
We're from the same rock
It's a collective shame.

The jagged edges
Between silence condoning
And thoughtful battle choice
Is solved when we question
And realise
There's a coronary artery
And bleeding in is necessary
We must smudge the line.

So now you've seen
Don't shut the blinds
And rage away
Flick the filaments on
Throw those curtains wide 
Raise your volume
Lift our lowest stage.

Ella Sylviana in A Minor

'Ella in A minor'

Your room was blue cause we thought you were a David,
Your hair changed from black to white, overnight.
You pulled out mine and cut the orange woollen plaits off my doll,
I pushed you over so you wouldn't fall yourself.
Slow down little girl, slow down.

The house on the street that was wide
Faced the orange trees on one side and the river out the back.
To the side of the shed was the red gum pile
I could climb it to hop into the neighbour's yard.
It's too high for you little girl, stay down.

And Pa had his lemons and we built a cubby out the back,
But we wouldn't let you in, no we wouldn't let you in.
It was tied together with wire and string,
The password we didn't tell you...
Was Priscilla-France.

We were five hundred Ks from home when you said it,
A story so wild I just had to believe it.
You said before I was born you were here all along,
Before our parents, before dinosaurs, before us all.
You made all the hills that we drove over.

Maybe you were here first.
I think you were here first.

You shaved your hair, you died it blue, it was all for a good cause.
You ran to Europe on your own without a word not of English.
You knew love before I met it,
And your body knew it too.
Slow down little girl, slow down.

I'm the calm and you're the storm, I thought,
Just keep you quiet, keep you still so the world does not explode.
But your rain on the tin roof and your lightning in the dark,
It keeps us warm when we're crying, it lights us up.
Keep rumbling little girl, make your noise.

Maybe you were here first.
I think you were here first.

You've done the groceries, washed the clothes,
Bought and wrapped all the Christmas presents.
You've sent me letters at the right time,
Told me off, perked me up, kept me safe.
Run as fast as you like little girl, we'll try to keep up.

Storm Chaser

Wild storm, I'll take you in.

With all your black, black clouds,

Your rumble through my feet.

And when you send your rain,

Somersaulting down,

I'll let mine tumble too.

Wild storm, I’ll stare you down,

And stand my ground as you unleash.

Don’t hold back,
I've toppled to your roar before,

But now I'm still as the moon.

Crash through me.

Wild storm, take your time,

Let me wash away this crazy day.

You lift me up with little sound,

Hurtle and hurl this world around

I’ll ride the beam into your eye

Our thunderous egos ... roll away.

Date a Girl who Doesn't Read

'You Should Date an Illiterate Girl' by Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly.

Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her. 

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mould. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice. 

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same. 

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. 

Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love. 

Do those things, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. 

Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. 

Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder.

A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god dammit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick. Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. 

A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived. 

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness. 

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colourful, and her typeface bold. 

You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

Hands off my Anzac

"Drape “Anzac” over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct. History will not stand for that. In history nothing is sacred. History is open inquiry; politics is slogans." 

- Peter Cochrane, Honorary Associate, Department of History at the University of Sydney.1

Dear Pop,

I imagine you as a bookish man, with a squarish head, surrounded by horse shoes and leather things. Granny told me that as you were dying, you said to her: "you're just so impulsive". She thought you said "repulsive" and she impulsively became angry with you. I imagine you were a bit quieter than her, your pre-war patience lingering gently through your stormy post-war grief and anger. 

We are lots of grandchildren, and I was the first born after you died. But I like to think about how I saved your life, if only for a short time. The story I was told was that it was Ash Wednesday, 1983, and fires were roaring through farms on the shipwreck coast of Victoria's south-west. It was 40-something degrees in Mildura in the far north of the state, where Mum was three months pregnant with me. She called to tell you, the phone call getting you out of your chair where you had fallen asleep in the smoke. The farm didn't make it, but you and your horseshoe did.

A few weeks ago, I bought a piano accordion. Sometimes I imagine travelling around the country on a horse, telling stories about working in rural Australia and the people I meet. Everyone thinks this is hilarious. The accordion would probably be a bit too heavy to take with me. Even I'm not sure if I am joking or if it is my way of connecting to a life, a story, a movie I can never see but can only imagine. Your life. Mum told me how there weren't many gifts for her and her eight siblings when growing up on the Naringal farm. But you gave her a horse. And you gave her that emerald green accordion. 

I'm rambling now. Stalling, because I don't know where to start. I went to an ANZAC Day service this year with your other grandaughter Nicole, and for the first time I wasn't marching as a Girl Guide or going to report on the event for work. I went for Granny, because I think she went for you. And I thought of you, and felt disloyal being there. Because I know you hated it. You refused to go to the RSLs, to talk about anything to do with the war.

Since I can't ask you about this, I can only write my version and hope you wouldn't throw this in the fire when you read it. I did not live this. You did. I did not live my mother's childhood or Granny's marriage. They did. So this is my thoughts based on stories as I have heard them.

The tragedy and cross-generational persistence of WWI and WWII trauma is not an unanswered question wrapped up in a bridal bouquet - it's not up for grabs. It runs deep, through layers and layers of trauma-fuelled emotion. The impact on the hearts and minds of those who were there, on their families and their children's families is unfathomable.

While my Pop was in and out of psychiatric care, Granny often faced the grief and loss of having their children die in childbirth, one run over and killed, and the loss of their farm in the Ash Wednesday fires, alone. Children would have to be placed in the care of other families, my mother once telling me she had her siblings pointed out to her at school one day. Neighbours came to help her with the harvest.

She was mad as well. Mad about him, mad at him, mad he was mad at her, mad from grief, mad about her children, about dancing, about swimming, ginger, violets, the colour green, toast with tomatoes, fish and chips with a bottle of lemon squash.

There are things I have heard about Pop and Granny that I cannot share. I never met him, though I wish I had. And I loved her. These things are too dark for a great-grandchild to read and know. They were too dark for their children to see.

But what our family keeps quiet from its great-grandchildren is something they have had to work through, each in their own time, in their own way. And some things just had to be forgiven.

But like my Pop, the soldiers who signed up and who were signed up against their will, to cross the world for wars they didn't fully understand because no one did, were not making the calls. They were just pulling the triggers. And sometimes they were so brainwashed, traumatised and scared they pulled those triggers without orders. Just like the way they would rear up or jump at the slightest hint of a bang! when they returned.  They started out believing they were the 'good guys', because questioning this would twist and strangle their souls. Many did question it, and suffocated.

But emotionally-thick lavishes of sentiment about these events does not equate to a national identity. This is what politicians want us to 'festivalise' in order to justify a military past and legitamise its present and future without inquiry. The human toll of war should not render "ANZAC" a sacred, untouchable history. Telling stories of the past with accuracy is not un-Australian, it is integral to understanding who we are and who we want to become.

As a journalism cadet, an editor instilled in me the importance of accuracy, of ethics, of believing in what you write, of making contributions you feel are worthy. Each week he had me climb down the stairs of the old newspaper building, into the 'dungeon', where a heavy door shut behind you and locked you in if you didn't put a wedge there or forgot to take the key in. There were all sorts of stories about what happened in that room. But kept in there were giant, fragile, bound copies of newspapers dating back more than 100 years. Each week I was to find the newspaper matching the day's date 100 years ago, 75 years ago, 50 years ago and 25 years ago. Then I had to look through all the stories in those newspapers and find the most interesting and significant ones and rewrite them for our 'historicals' page. It always took me longer than it was supposed to, as I would be engrossed in not only every story, but the way they were worded, imagining the characters in them, reading the advertisements, taking photos of the pictures of all the products and how they were pitched to the public. What it taught me, and what he told me, is that today's news is tomorrow's history and in every word you write, you are creating that history for your community and for generations to come. And so you quickly grasp a fluid and subjective meaning of what is truth, but also a deep sense of obligation.

So when SBS sports journalist Scott McIntyre was sacked for tweeting a series of remarks about the grimmer aspects of Australian military history on ANZAC Day because they were considered disrespectful and inappropriate, I racked my brain to recall what we are actually supposed to be doing as journalists.

I am not sure what school of journalism the suit wearers at SBS went to, but I was taught scrutinising and criticising public bodies of power in order to keep society informed and maintain a democracy, was our actual job description.

Just like on our own soils now, 'our Anzacs' did not always act with humanity and kindness. Before being shipped to Gallipolli from Egypt, many Australian soldiers treated locals with absolute racist brutality.

On Good Friday, 1915, about 2500 Anzacs rioted in Cairo, terrifying locals, setting fire to brothels. More followed. They threatened, bullied, drinking and whoring, left bills unpaid, and beat locals because they were "niggers".

Australian soldiers in Papua New Guinea kept diary notes about using Japanese prisoners for "machine-gun practise", purely out of revenge and racial hatred.

Thousands of Japanese women were raped in the years after the war, some of them by our Anzacs.

This testimony was recorded from Australian officer Allan Clifton, who acted as an interpreter in Japan in 1946.

"I stood beside a bed in hospital. On it lay a girl, unconscious, her long, black hair in wild tumult on the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before she had been raped by 20 soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on a piece of waste land. The hospital was in Hiroshima. The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australians.

The moaning and wailing had ceased and she was quiet now. The tortured tension on her face had slipped away, and the soft brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child that has cried herself to sleep."2

It's estimated the combined total number of civilian deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just under 100,000. Add to that the roughly 122,000 killed in the Allied bombing of Dresden and Tokyo in 1945.

Many said that for Scott McIntyre to even mumble such blasphemous suggestions was just un-Australian. But is our national identity not about freedom of thought and speech, or is that just what I want it to be? What it should be?

War is not our national identity. Australians are more than this. It is not the identity of the men and women who served in them, who find themselves acting in ways contrary to their core values, who break promises to themselves and their moral codes. They are more than this. Soldiers who are still returning now, from Afghanistan and Iraq, are so much more than this. My Pop was so much more than this.

In the dark, angry, dispossessed world of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, silence is the enemy. Glorification of acts soldiers, sailors and pilots never want to remember, is a repeated blow to the head and a threat to self worth.

If we cannot talk about it, if we cannot acknowledge mistakes and atrocities and seek to understand, explain and forgive them, how can our Anzacs?

Perhaps a tweet on social media over-simplifies the complexity of war behaviour and the impact it has had on those who went. But we do not live in a dictatorship. It is not a crime to question the past. We must separate our thoughts and emotions about the acts of scared and traumatised soldiers from the decisions of the leaders who put them there. We must analyse, acknowledge and rectify mistakes of the past to keep clear eyes on the future. To do so is not to judge. To do so is our duty.

Today is Mother's Day. It's just a couple of weeks after Anzac Day, which was one day after the anniversary of Granny's death. I am sitting outside in the Autumn sunshine, amongst the fruit trees, with a dog at my feet and can hear the ice-cream van around the corner. Like all my aunts and uncles, I imagine you would have liked gardening and maybe even taught them how. You would have loved your horses, and sitting quietly in a corner with a book and a dog beside you. Maybe you would have been partial to apple pie. 

I'm undecided about whether I'll go to an Anzac Day service again. Not because I do not love you. But because I do not want to celebrate or glorify what you had to go through. 

Mum summed it up for me perfectly this week. When animals kill each other, they choose another species. They do so quickly and then eat each other. What we do to each other as humans is something else all together. Trauma and stress don't make us stronger or more resilient. They change our genetic code and behaviour and this DNA is passed on from generation to generation.

Jews whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; children who grew up with abusive parents. They all carry with them more than just memories. Even after these experiences have been forgotten, the resulting residue of psychological and behavioural tendencies holds fast and is inherited.

For your sake, for Granny's sake and for the sake of my mother, my aunts, uncles and cousins, I wish I could have asked you about it all. I wish that you could have told me, and we could have told you it was okay. So now all I can say is that I am sorry you had to see what you saw, do what you did, and live with the thought you got away while your brother was taken prisoner of war among many other memories. I'm sorry for what it did to your heart and mind. 

Thank you for your love, for the horse and the accordion.

Happy Mother's Day and lots of love.

xoxox 


1. https://theconversation.com/the-past-is-not-sacred-the-history-wars-over-anzac-38596

2. https://theconversation.com/anzacs-behaving-badly-scott-mcintyre-and-contested-history-40955