Walkiing Away

An article on the front page of the SMH, 20170703, describes the evolving re-segregation and stratification of Australia's education system as being driven by a feedback loop based on the growing income and wealth inequality in our country.

Somehow, this took me away on this ramble, to mention an old book, and a newly published one.  One was buried for a while by social and legal dissaproval - the other would have been ridiculed, and even prosecuted, if published then, but seems so pertinent now that would be a shame not to read it.

The egalitarianism that served our society so well, that was begun by World War I and developed further by World War II, is being eroded.  In Australia, the two Wars, with their attendant slaughter of adult males, and the necessary breaking of class and gender stratification so that food and industrial production could be maintained and improved, helped break down the British style of class structure that had arrived here with the First Fleet.

The Great Depression that brought so many of the wealthy down into poverty, and forced so many families and individuals onto the road in search of work and sustenance, also helped to build the foundations of a genuinely egalitarian society.

The foundations, but not the whole edifice; even while the struggle to complete the structure continued, other forces - political, social, and religious - fought, and still fight (Tony Abbott being a good example) to thwart the progress made thus far, and to take us back to some mythical "Golden Age"

For some reason, I was put in mind of the enormous uproar amongst the "upper classes" when Lady Chatterley's Lover came to their notice.  Although it was several times and in a number of places the subject of bans and obscenity prosecutions, it seems more likely that the real fear was the breach it made in the walls the kept the "lower classes" in their place.

Obscene and erotic books, visual art, and poetry, were quite common, and rarely drew the ire of the establishment (who were often avid purchasers or collectors), but a book that transgressed class barriers in such a way drew immediate and ferocious condemnation.  There was plenty written, even at the time, that acknowledged the often quite promiscuous and decadant life-styles of the upper classes, even though that clashed directly with the morality that the long rule of Queen Victoria had worked deep into the grain of the middle and lower classes of British society - so it seems unlikely that the mere mention of bawdy goings on, or the use of explicit language was, of itself, the primary sin committed by the writer and the publishers.

Lawrence had touched a sore spot in the psyche of the nobility similar to the one that drove so many lynchings in the USA, where white men seemed to live in constant fear that the black men would be"too attractive" to white women.  Even today, in so many places and cultures, there can be found strong sanctions against what is considered, locally, to be miscegenation - it is not the exclusive prerogative of Anglo or Western European societies.  Similarly, at a family level, parents can often be found trying to impose a degree of class or cultural selectivity on the mating or marital choices of their progeny.

In both Britain and the USA, a part of the population was enjoying a great degree of power over another part, based on custom and often arbitrary distinctions.  In Britain, the clothing worn, the dialect or accent spoken, and a knowledge of complex and arcane rules of social behaviour, would mark a man or a woman as being of a certain class.

In the USA, skin colour seemed a more certain indicator of the treatment an individual would receive from society, the legal system, and the economic system, though the ruling classes still tried to enforce a societal structure that ran contrary to the widely held belief that unrestricted social mobility was available to any citizen willing to try and better himself.

Herself was a different matter, much of the time - much of the advice given in books and periodicals of the 19th and early 20th centuries suggested ways in which women could make themselves interesting enough to be able to hitch themselves to some upwardly mobile man's wagon.  There are still plenty of books, periodicals, and tv shows promoting that theme.

Australia had inherited the British class system, but promptly set about subverting it by promoting freed convicts to positions of wealth and power - of course, we had the Aboriginal Australians to look down upon, as well as immigrants of "non-white" background, so there was always a "lower class" above which the rest of society could complacently sit.

So, here we are, well through the second decade of the 21st century, over 7 decades on from the end of WW II, and half a century on from the hopeful blossoming of egalitarian movements that some called "the dawning of the age of Aquarius" - and the battle of the forces of hope and generosity versus the forces of greed and regressions continues as fiercely as ever.

For a long time, we told stories about the good guys winning, and setting the world on a course to becoming a better place for all its occupants, but while we were patting ourselves on the back and celebrating the inevitability of progress, the counter attack was already under way.  The Science Fiction shelves blossomed with futuristic hopes and utopian scenarios - though a darker under-current always lurked.  That current seems to have swirled to the surface - even the newest movies in the Star Wars franchise are so much grittier and darker than the first three.  You never saw an Imperial Trooper with dirt or blood on his uniform in those days.

Is that why so much of the storytelling of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries is dystopian?  The YA shelves in our libraries, once full of hopeful adventure and heroes journies, now drip with dark tales of dire worlds, fractured societies, and desperate quests for safety and survival.

Nowhere have I encountered writing that more thoroughly works through this whirlpool of hope and nihilism, greed and generosity, love and hatred, that fills our bookshelves, and our daily newsfeeds and tv screens, than Cory Doctorow's Walkaway.

It is a big read, and an intense one - every word carries meaning.  It is one book where the discussion of the politics and science of what the human race is doing to itself, the planet, and each other, is essential not only to the story but to the development of the characters.  The emotional ride is like a BMX heading off the top of Mount Kosciuszko with no brakes.  Give it a go - like any work of such intensity, the journey won't kill you, but you won't finish it unscathed.

Imaginary Worlds

Fantasy and the fantastic feature in quite different ways in two books that I have enjoyed recently. A book by Fredrik Backman - My Grandmother sends her regards and apologises - is a wonderful blend of whimsy and gritty reality.

At its core is the fantasy world woven by a loving grandmother for her very special, almost eight year old grand-daughter.  Elsa, who is 7 but about to turn 8, is precocious, perceptive, and pedantic, and not terribly popular with her schoolmates.  Her family life is complicated, and is about to become even more so.  The fantasies her grandmother created to help her cope will turn out to interact with the real world in ways that neither Elsa nor the reader can possibly predict.  This is one that I will be reading again.

(Speaking of Grandparenting matters, and recognising the brilliant efforts put in by Parents who write or otherwise create, how does anyone get anything done - such as a blog entry - while trying to keep an eye on the wellbeing of a small tribe of under tens)

Another book worth keeping close at hand - 15 short stories by some great writers - is Old Mars, and it is another of those wonderful compilations edited by George R R Martin and Gardner Dozois.  Do you miss the wonderful solar system our science fiction writers inhabited in the century or two before humanity launched its robot invasion of Mars?  Yes?  Does Barsoom call to you across the gulf of space?  Well, this one is a must read - many of the stories have twists that will take you completely by surprise, and the various versions of Mars that these writers have come up with are compelling and richly detailed, despite most of the stories being only thirty or so pages.

On the other hand, have you ever seen a glossy new cover, emblazoned with the name of one of your favourite authors, and raced home with it, only to discover that while the concept described in the blurb is new and interesting, and the execution leaves you flat?  One such shiny new item caught my eye a couple of days ago, on the SF and Fantasy shelves. It was the first book in Scalzi's new series "The Collapsing Empire".  As I was checking it out, one of my colleagues, also a fan of John Scalzi, asked me to hand it over so she could place a reservation on it for herself.

Well, if you are reading this blog, EJ, I am not sure what I can say to you - the style is so different to his usual intense, descriptive, clever writing.  In fact, it seemed rushed, and sometimes summarised rather than showed.  Was I disappointed because it is so different, or am I right to think it lacks a lot of the delicate touches I have come to associate with Scalzi?  I still read it through to the end, to see where he was taking the characters, but was able to skim across the pages, rather than having to take note of every word - as a good writer should make the reader do.

The Road Trip

A recent trip north was slowed to a crawl by the flashing lights of a number of police cars.  Traffic was funnelled into a single lane and allowed to crawl past the scene of an accident that had, it seemed, injured nothing except, perhaps, the pride of a driver.  A man and a woman - older, and well dressed, were standing with some police, while tow truck drivers began the task of righting and recovering a very nice four wheel drive, and an overturned caravan.  They seemed so calm and stoic, and I couldn't help wondering what they were thinking.

That wondering simmered and fermented for a few days before producing the following - if one of my readers should turn out to be the couple I observed, please accept my apologies if I have imputed thoughts or feelings that were not truly yours.  Otherwise, please enjoy.....

THE ROAD TRIP

Richard Slade

July, 2017

Liz stepped back a few paces when the young policewoman began questioning Neville.  He had his arms folded, his shoulders back, chin up, and back straight.  It was that look that she had mistaken, forty five years ago, for manly determination and courage.

Was it that long ago?  Forty five years of of wifely duties – of raising children, hosting dinner parties for his work colleagues, running the household (as best she could, given Neville's tight reign on all matters financial), and supporting him during his relentless climb up the various corporate ladders he had latched onto.

Somehow, the forty five years did not seem as long as the first six months of Neville's retirement.   

What would two years of travelling round Australia with him feel like – a century?  It would have to be two years, at the least.  That's how long a lease they had granted the new occupants of their lovely, tree-shaded, St Ives home.  Two years, minus the two long days since they had driven away from it.  She could still see the smiles on the faces of their tenants, as they directed the removalists and savoured the gardens.

Now, home was an eight metre long caravan,  The caravan was luxurious, as was the brand new Landcruiser that Neville had purchased to tow it with.

Had that policewoman noticed the way Liz's head had jerked up, and her raised eyebrows, as Neville wove a detailed description of the fast moving, non-descript, silver sedan that had cut in front of him, forcing the evasive manoeuvre that had caused their sudden departure from that tight bend in the highway?  A very badly made bend, in Neville's opinion; one that shared the blame equally, along with the miscreant driver – now long gone from the scene of his crime – for what had happened next.

Neville, she was sure, had not noticed anything.  Chin jutting, gazing into the distance, Neville, as ever, noticed nothing that Liz said or did.  The policewoman slipped a few more glances at Liz, even as she kept jotting Neville's utterances in her notebook.  Did she suspect?  What would Liz say if the constable decided to question her?

Liz rolled her eyes and looked at the caravan.  It was on its side in the long grass between the north and south-bound lanes of the highway.  The tow-truck driver had connected a steel cable somewhere under the front of the Cruiser, which was, miraculously, still upright, though pointing the wrong way.  He had shaken his head when Neville had declared that vehicle and van would be "right as rain in no time at all"

The driver had tried to explain just how badly damaged both vehicles were, but his words had fallen into the well of silence, while Neville droned on.

He thought she had been asleep when the crash had happened, but she had only closed her right eye.  Neville's confidence in his own driving skills was not shared by Liz, who had, for decades, done all the driving, whether of children to sport, school, or events, or of a tipsy Neville, coming home from another corporate function.  So Liz kept one eye open, hoping she would see the end coming and have time to offer up one final, brief prayer.  In this case, she had time for quite a bit of praying before the Cruiser and van finished sliding across the wet grass, but all the came out were a handful of expletives she had not realised she knew.  Neville chastised her for her language, several times, before the police arrived.

She smiled, just a little, and clutched her handbag tightly to her aching ribs.  It contained something that she had never before owned; a card that gave her access to their bank account – his account. 

Neville had agreed to provide her with one just before their departure, swayed by her vivid evocation of what might happen to him if he suffered a medical emergency in some far outback place, and she was unable to access the finances they might need for the provision of quality care.

She smiled again.  Taree would have the right brand of bank, and an airport, or a train station.  It might take days before Neville realised that she was gone, and weeks more for him to believe it.

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.