A Misplaced Spring

Here we are, a couple of days past our Winter Solstice, and my wanderings outside have discovered a garden in a state of confusion. I thought I might share a few photos of what has been happening.

The first Daffodil has bloomed, and more buds are ready....

The Hardenbergia Violacea is in full flower....

Potato plants are thriving as if it is September, even as the Lettuce seedlings begin to unfurl....

The Lemon is flowering.....

And the Borage, normally a flower that brightens Spring and Summer days, is flowering and feeding the bees that are willing to brave the Winter breeze....

The ballerina Fuschias are flowering as well, emjoying the sunshine that reaches in beneath the outstretched limbs of Alnus Jorullensis....

And the first shoots are opening on a Mullberry that is being developed as a bonsai.  Will any of these survive the frosts and blizzards that we expect over the winter months?  Will the snow fall and the sleet fly, this year, as it so often did?  Perhaps there will be no snow or sleet, and the frosts will merely tickle and nip the edges of the leaves and petals that should have slept for a few more months.  What adjustments will I need to make to my gardens to help them flourish as the seasons change?  What adjustments will our society need to make to help its members flourish as the seasons shift, and the sea levels rise?

Skewed points of view

I have been contemplating how my age, social and cultural backgrounds, and life experience, affect not only my point of view as I write a story, but the points of view that I inflict on my characters.

There have been occasions in writing group that some of us have attempted to write from a different pov than our natural position - different gender, for example, is a common prompt.  But there is also something I said to a friend some years ago about generation gaps.  I have really grown up in a different world to someone who is twenty or forty years younger than me.  When I am talking with someone of another generation, though we both say we are speaking English, the words have subtly changed their meanings from my time to theirs.  New words and phrases have been coined, old words have been put to new purposes, and some words have fallen from use altogether.

To some extent, I can understand my parents, because I grew up listening to them, and my children have the same experience with me - but even another half a generation later, the flow of language has swept onwards, leaving me stranded on the mud-banks of time.  Doctor Who does a remarkable job, all things considered, being able to talk to humans from so many periods of history (and pre-history, it seems)

The differences include the technology, but also significant cultural changes - my experience with the tension of the Cold War and its constant threat of nuclear war is different to the experiences of people born since 1970, but that may be changing as we speak, and another generation may be experiencing the subtle "valley of fear" effect that impacted  the lives, decisions and thought processes of so many people who grew up in the fifties and sixties.

Likewise, my parents and grandparents had direct experience of the Great Depression, and one or more of the World Wars.  My grandparents saw the great Flu Epidemic that slew so many of those who survived the First World War.  I lived in a world where vaccination, refrigeration, mains electricity, treated water on tap, and push-button sewage disposal seemed to have always existed - they knew what it was to walk to the well, or the water tank behind the house, and they knew of the need to boil the water, and they saw the children die of diseases - polio and measles - that were to my generation just a distant rumour.  The evidence of that passing world was still to be seen, in the maimed survivors of the recent World War who could be met on any suburban or city street,  in the newsreels at the cinema that discussed the final defeat of polio, or the visits to the rural relatives who still lived on dusty or muddy farms, getting their water from well or tank, and lighting their houses with kerosene lamps.

Of course, the discrepancy in viewpoints is not just caused by temporal differences - geography can have a say.  The charmed life that I and so many like me have taken for granted has never existed in many parts of the planet, including parts of Australia, and still does not exist in places where it should.  It is possible that it never will. In the seventies, we dared to hope that a Golden Age was dawning for all the world - in 2017 we wonder if the world will survive, and some of us believe that we may already lived through the best of times.  Is that why dystopian novels attract such a following?

Of course, many things don't fundamentally change, but simply adjust their clothes or hairstyles - bigotry, greed, anger, and fear still pervade society, and are still used by politicians seeking to gain power for themselves without having to present intelligent and positive policies.

Technological changes have effects beyond the obvious - someone like me, who has lived through many such changes (as well as launching into a Thoreau inspired "tree-change" for a couple of decades) is often stunned when a younger person reveals an assumption that certain services have "always been around"  Try explaining black and white television to an eight year old in the nineteen eighties, or the previous absence of mobile phones to someone born after 2005.  Technology that is now ubiquitous is considered to be something that "no one could live without"

For example, I recently heard an historian talking about the complaints made to the Council of the City of Sydney over the years.  I had never heard before that, when gas powered street lamps were introduced to Sydney, a policy designed to save money meant that the lamps were not lit on the night of the full moon, nor on several nights either side of it.  What seemed a logical cost saving measure  to an accountant who may never have been out in the streets after dark was a serious nuisance - even a danger - to the many people who needed to travel the city streets after sunset.

Did that happen in other cities of the world as the first street lamps were introduced?  If I were writing a novel set in that time, what other such quirks might affect my characters as they go about their business??  It is hard to realistically imagine a future world in a novel, but it can be quite tricky to write about the past if we take our 21st Century assumptions with us into the novel.

Goodbye Girlie

If you have in your family people over the age of 80 years, and wonder what planet they were born on, then I can recommend this book as a window to their world, and as a way to understand where the Australia you are living in now came from.  The world we occupy is very different from their world, and this book - written by a woman who was born less than a century ago - not only shows you that world, but shows you why so much of our world is as it is.

Patsy Adam-Smith's Goodbye Girlie is a wonderful memoir - the sequel to her memories of childhood that were published in Hear the Train Blow.

It is too easy for people to paint a picture of a golden age in Australia's past - an age that really only shone for people in the upper levels of society.  The minority who lived well before and between the world wars were some of the men, and a handful of women - for the rest, life was somewhere between tough and abyssmal.  Patsy enlisted as a nurse's aid and did so to escape the boredom, poverty, and repression - social, economic, and religious - that was the life of a woman in so much of Australia.  Many other women did so for the same reasons, and more than a few of the men who enlisted also saw a brighter future for themselves if they could get into uniform and out of the grinding life allowed to "the lower classes" - if you are over 60 then you grew up listening to and interacting with older relatives who had lived that sort of life. If you are under 30, these books are an opportunity to hear stories that are otherwise being forgotten, and lost to posterity.

Such harsh conditions still exist in pockets of Australia, even today - and as for the wider world, well, I am truly glad that Australia is where I live.  Perfect we are not, but when you let Patsy's stories wash over you, you understand just how fortunate a country we are.  When you have time to sit and read for a few hours, I can recommend any of her books, just as I can recommend Ion Idriess, for anyone wanting to understand those times that were not really so long ago.

Stories lost, and found.

In the galaxy of stories that is humanity, each of us orbits among the other stars of our home constellations, spinning our yarns into the thread of our story and weaving it into the vast, complex spiral.  Some weave tightly, close to other stars, warming each other, bending each others trajectories - some soar alone through the gaps and along the rim.

When a story-teller ends, when the flame sputters to its end, the constellation changes shape, and memories begin to fade and fragment.  The once tightly ordered solar system becomes a debris field to be swept up by others - or ignored and forgotten.

Though the once bright fire has been extinguished, there are still sparks and embers to be found that can tell of the glories that were, and keep some chapters, paragraphs, or even just a few phrases of the story, alive in other orbits.

Sifting through such a debris field can be joyful and utterly melancholy in the same minutes.  A dusty hoard of old cards and letters will reveal traces of dreams and nightmares, and hopes fulfilled or dashed, or even a squirrel-cache of notes or coins. A hidden diary or box of letters may reveal a surprising, even shocking, turn of events or emotions that had never been revealed before.

Carefully ordered craft cupboards, work-benches, and garden sheds have changed from places of purposeful resources to mere piles of souvenirs, as the family archaeologists assess, evaluate, allocate, or discard.

Yet, as we sort, each object still carries faint vibrations or echoes of its original task in the long story that has now ended.   A single photograph can bring all work to a stop, as the memories awaken, and a part of the story is called forth and handed around to be savoured and cherished at least one last time.  A special cup or teapot from childhood visits, long ago, or the hand-made apron that allowed the visitor to join in the work at the kitchen table, and the searcher is back in the early days of their own story.

And so the severed threads can be woven into another part of the great tapestry, continuing a weave and weft that may have been handed on over many generations. Souvenirs are often found that tell of lives generations past - artefacts that have been gathered in other long ago expeditions to other darkened stars.  We are fortunate, who can sit with friends and family, amid the tears and the laughter, and dwell again in the golden age of childhood that such fragments evoke.

As well as nostalgia, there is the carefully preserved evidence of a world that no longer exists, and we remember how much has changed even in the course of our own lifetimes, let alone in the lives of those who came not so many decades before us. It often yields clues that allow the investigator to chart and date the beginning of the decline that precedes most ends, and offers all sorts of little lessons in ways that life can be lived, and enjoyed, and managed, and endured.  Those of us who can embark on such expeditions are fortunate, for so many stories end suddenly, catastrophically, or even intentionally, and final chapters are left unwritten, or erased.

Look around your constellation - cherish your stories and theirs; they can so easily be lost forever.