The first Freya

When I was about 15 there was an Australian film I saw, I can’t even remember where or with whom. It was called The Year My Voice Broke.

There was a girl in this film and her name was Freya. I had never heard the name before but it stayed with me for many years, and I remembered this Freya as being a bit wild and almost otherworldly. I remembered her cotton dresses and her wanderings around the barren but beautiful landscape in which the film was set. My second child was born 18 years after the film was released, and she was never going to have any other name but Freya.

In the time between seeing my first Freya and holding my very own, I had learned more about the name – the Norse goddess of love and beauty, who rode in a chariot drawn by two cats, whose day was Friday (the day my Freya was born) and whose animals were cats and stallions. I did not watch The Year My Voice Broke again, although I found it on DVD at a discount store a couple of years ago and bought it.

Last night I decided on a whim to finally watch it again, this time with my husband who had never seen it before. I watched my first Freya with eyes almost 20 years older and saw what it must have been that drew me to her, although I couldn’t honestly recall most of the storyline. I saw her wildness, her connection to spirit, her barely contained beauty and her wild yellow hair that matched the hills around her home town.

I had not expected the story to be one of birth and loss, of ghosts and the heavy, unavoidable burden of history. As a 15-year-old I had not seen any of these things, or at least had not found them memorable. How lovely it was to know that even though my life now carries so much more and sometimes weighs so heavily, that my first Freya has not changed at all. She is still wandering the windswept hills, wearing her cotton dresses and windswept hair, being beautiful and wild.

In the sun born over and over ...

There was a moment last Sunday that was notable for lots of reasons. It was on a long stretch of beach, which makes it memorable for setting alone, and it involved a family outing and a challenging but visually and physiologically rewarding walk up a very steep hill. As we walked back along the beach under an enormous blue sky, I glanced behind me for the fifteenth time to make sure Rosa was following, prone as she is to pausing and picking up shells or seaweed or spinning in circles or just stopping to plunge her hands deep into the sand because it's there. She wasn't behind me. She wasn't in front of me. She wasn't beside me either, at least not on the ocean side, and I suppose I had that split second of panic where I thought my child had vanished into thin air, before I looked to my other side and about five metres into the distance to see she had climbed the metre-high ledge of sand and was running along the ridge with pure abandon. I walked along beside her but kept my distance, and although we were both moving I felt completely fixed on her and her lightning-bolt, pure-hearted spirit. I'm almost ashamed to admit my brief moment of regret at not having brought my phone to capture this image of her, but it occurred to me then that it would be with me forever anyway, and I resolved to try something I haven't done before. I wanted to see if I could write this image, to conjure it using only words, and create an image just as real as any Instagram post. In this age where everything has to be an image or a soundbite to command attention, I wanted to see if I could make something with words.

She is running along the very top of the ridge, as though the thin line where the sand meets the vaulted blue sky is an extension of her bare feet. She seems to run without thought or effort, although her sleeves are bunched up above her elbows, her skirt long since discarded and her tights rolled just under her knees, as if to prove her protests at having to wear too many clothes on this sunny winter’s day. Her hair was pulled into a bun this morning but many hours of adventure have almost brought it undone. Rebellious strands, like the thickets of wheat-like, waving seagrass along the ridge line beneath her feet, catch the early afternoon sun and are rendered golden. Her focused, smiling face is radiant too, a reflection of pure joy and a primal urge to move, to run, to be free. I am reminded of words I once quoted when she was a toddler, and somehow they are even more perfect now than they were then:

“Under the new-made clouds and happy as the day was long,
 In the sun born over and over, I ran my heedless ways.” 

(Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill) 

Dweller on the threshold

Last weekend a Writers Festival came to town and filled the streets of Newcastle, along with my calendar. I was one of many volunteers on two of the three days, as well as a finalist in the festival’s inaugural Microlit competition for short fiction (200 words or less).

The first session I saw while volunteering was a meeting of two Newcastles – old and new, steel and sky, blue collar and white. John Lewer spoke about his new book, Not Charted On Ordinary Maps, which documents the period between the announcement of BHP’s steelworks closure and the actual day the gates closed for the final time. It was two-and-a-half years, and for the 5000 mostly male workers must have been a time of great pain and uncertainty, despite the overall hope that many in Newcastle, including myself, held for a future unfettered by the dirty great industry that had been its making.

The room was full of men who had clearly seen all those things – the making of an industry, the pain of its loss. Lewer recounted the incredible figures around that two-and-a-half year period – the productivity gains, the almost negligible absenteeism. Back then these men had something to prove, and though it ultimately fell on deaf ears, I don’t think it was lost on a single person gathered at City Hall last Friday. I doubt whether most of those gathered had ever been to a Writers Festival, though of course I could be wrong. It seemed they were there seeking answers of some kind, these middle-aged and elderly men who carried with them a life of hard work and resignation. I think I winced when Lewer quoted from his book the cruel observation that, when the death knell finally sounded for BHP’s Newcastle steelworks, the unions and workers alike were instrumental “in their own demise”. The words could not have been easy for these once-strong men to hear, even 17 years later. They, like the city, are connected far beyond knock-off time to a place beyond the physical, to a comradeship that helped them rise above the politics and brutal conditions they endured for most of their working lives.

The title of Lewer’s book comes from a passage in W.A. Metcalfe’s academic article ‘Mud and Steel: The Imagination of Newcastle’ and when Lewer read out the passage I was hanging on every word:

‘Not just space, then, nor just bricks and mortar, Newcastle is rallying calls, pledges of loyalty, moral terrors … the analyst of Newcastle must explore memories, dreams and imaginings not charted on ordinary maps.’

It reminded me of a poem I wrote last year.

Novocastration

I recognise this place.

I’d know that stifled optimism anywhere.

A place full of heart,

If you believe the paper.

But all your major arteries are empty.

Beards have replaced the boilermakers

And there are different tracks,

All going nowhere.

Cafes have cropped up

Where corned beef used to be the rage

And you don’t do smoko now,

Just coffee to go or kerbside espresso.

You’re going places.

Always have been.

Your ship’ll come in,

But then it’s gone by dawn

Down the old Coal River

And out to new horizons where I can’t see

And you’ll never be.

-                                                                Jodi Vial

By Saturday I was in a much more optimistic mood. The sun was shining, the streets were buzzing, and I was standing outside the Civic Playhouse with my volunteers' clipboard smiling and saying hello to Drusilla Modjeska, one of many wonderful authors who visited the city for the festival. I snuck in later to see part of her session, in which she discussed her writing life, and caught an anecdote that will stay with me for a long time.

Modjeska related the story of taking some visiting Papua New Guinean women to a large Australian shopping centre so that they might buy some clothing and souvenirs to take back home. She recalled seeing the matriarch of the group, “one of the most powerful women I have ever known, and I have known some very powerful women”, suddenly lose all her strength and begin to look panicked. When Modjeska asked the woman what was wrong, her reply came from generations of connection we can only imagine, having begun to lose our grip on it some time ago. “Where is your ground?” the woman pleaded. “Where is your ground?”

That night I was back in City Hall for a discussion on microfiction and the screening of all four finalists in the festival’s Microlit competition. I was disappointed not to win, just a little, but loved hearing the other works and my own, voiced by professional actors and with audiovisual enhancement by Melbourne writer and artist Richard Holt. I can’t provide you with the full package here, but following is the piece for which I was shortlisted. 

I know how it feels to be seeking ground, but with this work and the continual work of writing and learning, I believe I have found mine and hope it will never be lost to me again.

Threshold 

There are two bare feet below her on the weathered boards. She is unsure if they belong to her or someone else. Either way they anchor her as her body tilts and rolls through another wave of pain and she comes out gasping with exhaustion and relief. The boards breathe along with her, with the spirit of the women who came before her, who birthed and were born in this house, held above the earth by this floor and beneath the sky by this roof but no less a part of them both. She lifts her head to take a great belly full of air before the next wave and she sees a small bird, a swallow, rendered in plaster but moving, flying, as surely as if it were feathers and bone. The swallow’s wings lift her spirit but her body is still anchored to the dusty floor and filled with pain and purpose. She braces against the nearest door, claws at the timber as though she might bring the whole place down. Her baby is at the threshold of the earth and she is reborn with him, into a motherhood and sisterhood from which she will never return.                                                                             Jodi Vial 2015

freedom overload

It seems we are all trapped, one way or another. Either trapped in circumstances we did not foresee or trapped in those we intentionally created for ourselves. And there we are. The decision is whether to struggle or to give in, which seems an immense decision on the face of it but ultimately neither one matters in the end. Either way you are still trapped, and even if you manage to get free there will only be another trap attached to freedom. 

Some would say that not having to go to work would be the ultimate freedom. Some would delight, if only they could, in not having to be anywhere or do anything all day. No places to go, no people to see. The enormous freedom. Yet I know that with that kind of freedom comes complete uncertainty. Like letting a toddler do whatever they want to do without any intervention. At first it’s fun but then they get hungry, or tired, or both, and without an adult to feed them or put them to bed a toddler is lost. Confused. Panic-stricken. Their freedom is their prison.

So I’m eating biscuits for lunch and drinking tea because I can, and because my self-control has momentarily left the building, along with my self-belief and self-preservation. I’m sure they’ll be back. They’ve just ducked out for some fresh air and adult conversation. You tend to miss these things when you don’t get out much.

what solitude sounds like

It’s the walking I miss.

The feeling of bare earth

on the soles of my feet, the freedom

to move without waiting.

The clear soundless notion of solitude.

I am worn by these days, worn and tired

and sinking

below the surface.

I crave air that is mine alone,

just enough to fill my lungs

and heart again. Just enough

to open up a path within me

where my feet can go wherever they choose.

songlines

There is little not to love about a mixtape, especially a well thought-out, emotionally invested one. I think the days of having to press record and play on your trusty tape player made them even more of a gift, but perhaps I'm just being nostalgic. One of my uni assignments this semester was to make a mixtape with words rather than music, to recall songs heard during pivotal life moments and how they made me feel. So I pressed rewind and this is what happened.

Homeward Bound, Simon & Garfunkel 

I am 21 years old and two weeks into an indefinite stay in England when I find myself on a bus bound for the quaintly named Cotswolds. The grey of the sky and surrounding countryside has begun seeping into my bones. In my Sony Walkman I have a cassette, and Simon & Garfunkel are serenading me, in their strange and mournful way, as the bus window frames an endlessly rolling film and the soundtrack plays on in my head. I am heading to a job interview that might keep me here in England, and the thought of that is both slightly exciting and thoroughly depressing at the same time. The job is – again quaintly named – Mother’s Help, which if it were anywhere but the Cotswolds would have me thinking about Mick Jagger and running for the shelter of her Mother’s Little Helper, but I’m not in central London any more. 

I’m sittin’ in a railway station, got a ticket for my destination. On a tour of one-night stands, my suitcase and guitar in hand, and every stop is neatly planned for a poet and a one-man band. Homeward bound, I wish I was homeward bound.  

This music was made for these lonely grey fields, made for this bus ride to God knows where, this exact moment in my life when, not for the last time, things could seriously go either way. But the only way I really want to go is home.

Don’t Stand So Close to the Window, Paul Kelly

 
The rain has left rivers of salt on the outside of my bedroom window, but I am one storey up and would be risking death to regain my view. Ocean glimpses are nice, but they don’t mean that much to me. 
It’s my first flat – solid brick, Art Deco, a block of four two streets from the beach.  Spinster pad doesn’t have quite the same ring as the male equivalent, but that’s what it is. On summer afternoons I open all the windows and let the sea in. Then I try not to drown. I turn up Paul Kelly on my new stereo and forget that I have to work tomorrow. The window sills are wide enough to sit on and I usually do. Sometimes I imagine falling from here, leaning too far out the open window while I wait for the sound of his car. Oh my love, how we fell. What we’ve done now we never can tell. 
From where I am sitting I cannot see the bars.

Flame Trees, Sarah Blasko

 
I’m a million miles from a Blue Light Disco and Barnesy’s version of this song when I first hear Sarah Blasko spinning it from bogan anthem into poetry. I am days away from redundancy after holding a job I neither love nor hate for the past twenty years, and the heartache is rolling in and out like coal ships on a far too familiar horizon. This town and I have history, but who’s to say it’s not just sentimental bullshit? She sings these words like they’ve never been screamed by a hundred drunken bodies in a hundred beer-soaked back bars, and when she pitches that line: Do you remember, nothing stopped us on the field, in our day?  I am lost to an emotion with unknown origins. No longer young, no longer wanted on the factory floor, and wondering who will go and who will stay. Which one of us can tell the biggest lies?

Here If You Want, The Waifs

She’s alone on the stage, single spotlight, sweaty from a full set with the band, but there is something else she needs to say and she’s saying it to me. I could hazard a guess, but I’ll never know, why you put these walls up I can’t get through. It’s as though you want to be lonely and blue. There is just her voice in a cavernous theatre but it finds me. Over and over again it finds me. It pierces through the weight on my chest, through the cage that is my ribs, and sets the leaden bird free.

The Unwelcome Guest, Billy Bragg and Wilco

 
This song is my constant companion on the late and lonely drive back along the freeway from Sydney to Newcastle. I have babies in bed but I skulk through the dark mist and midnight like a robber on horseback. I don’t have a shiny black Bess, like Billy does, but a silver hatchback to carry me home from a night’s work. I’ve been lured by the big guns, The Financial Review, to do some casual work after my longest break from journalism in a decade. Like Billy’s highwayman, I’m doing it for the money and my conscience chooses the midnight run home to get the better of me. 
I don’t know good horse, as we trot in this dark here, if robbing the rich is for worse or for best. They take it by stealing, and lying and gambling, and I take it my way, my shiny black Bess.

write on

There’s an entry in one of my schoolgirl journals, circa 1986, that proclaims the great life decision I made after watching The World According To Garp. I wanted to be a writer, my 14-year-old self said. A real writer. I have done many things since that particular journal entry, but I have never wavered from that desire. Writing is the only thing I do without second-guessing myself, without feeling like maybe I’m in the wrong place and I should give up before somebody figures that out. I do it because I love it, because it exorcises my demons and exercises my mind, which has been known to turn upon itself if it doesn’t get its daily run around the block. This year I’ve been studying writing – my own and others – and I have been compelled to sit down and write when otherwise I might have put it off. It has been wonderful. It has reminded me of my teenage dream to be a real writer, and pushed me to submit some of my stories to places where I hope they might be appreciated. One of those places was the sublime womankind magazine, and although they will not be publishing the five-day meditation journal I wrote as part of their competition, I enjoyed the process of writing it and hope you might enjoy reading it. In the past few weeks I am becoming accustomed to things not turning out as planned. My first instinct is to blame myself for being less than an ideal person, or candidate, or writer. But first instincts aren’t always accurate, and so I have decided to try focusing on the many wonderful things I do have in my life, rather than the few things I don’t. If you are casting your eyes over these words, then thankyou. You are one of the pluses.

Monday, November 22
At a little round table with two seats, on the edge of a footpath at the edge of a busy city, my friend and I are catching up on an absence of a few months. In the fabric that is 30 years of friendship, these dropped stitches are easily caught. Our families, our newest discoveries, our latest endeavours are worked into an effortless conversation that comes from having known one another for three-quarters of our lives. We pick up our common threads and weave them into a beautiful two hours of easy and joyful companionship, a meditation on the changing nature of life and the everlasting nature of friendship that fills me with gratitude.


Tuesday, November 23
The afternoon shade has fallen on our backyard trampoline and my five-year-old daughter is trying out some tricks for me. “Watch me Mummy”, she says over and over until it finally sinks in, into my brain which is beginning to rewire itself for baths and dinner and bedtime. So I stop myself and I watch. Really watch. I see her small but strong legs send her flying into the air, see her arms hold her there for a split second before she lands again. She  asks me to count how many bounces .. 22, 23, 24 .. and there is nothing else but to watch. Watch me Mummy.

Wednesday, November 24
It is the kind of day that signals its intentions not long after dawn, when the air should be fresh and welcoming but instead is a hangover from the unbearable heat of the day before. There will be no respite today, the sluggish morning seems to say. And while I curse the broken air-conditioning in my car, as well as my pitiful reliance on it, I need only wait a few hours to receive my blessing.  As I leave an evening meeting for the short drive home under a celestial full moon and a sky full of stars, it is not artificially chilled air that sustains me but the still, cool evening air blowing in through the open windows.

Thursday, November 25
The warmth of the sun is held in the sheets as I take them down from the clothesline, folding them roughly as a matter of course even though I know they are destined to return to the beds they came from. There is merciful shade over this part of the backyard now, and having gathered my washing I join our six hens in their own afternoon gathering place, though my mood and movement are much slower than theirs. I sit on the cool grass just for a moment to watch them, their eyes intent on every patch of dirt or inch of lawn they happen to be hovering over. I envy them their focus, their innate but somehow effortless work ethic, their simple but admirable life. Watching them makes me feel peaceful, and I can’t help but smile.

Friday, November 26
The meditative act of writing has been with me since I was young, although I have only recently begun to recognise it as such. What began in me as a compulsion and was received by many as a talent has now become so much more. It is a daily practice, a revered process that may not always produce great quantities or uniform quality but is nonetheless a priceless gift to myself and my sense of connection. I am grateful for what it teaches me and expands in me every day, just as I am grateful for the inspiration that comes from reading the words of others.