PETROLEUMISM

- three short essays on greed - 

1. Australia - America's cultural understudy (2005)   

After a long and sweaty game of social persuasion, I reluctantly climbed into the highly polished four wheel drive that was packed with class two mothers, bound for a Christmas get together at the local Leagues Club. I was horribly underdressed, undercoiffed and totally unprepared.  I was the new girl. Not from  around here……

    “Did you see those terrible riots in Seattle? Those hippies should be locked up, it was disgraceful.” a nodding bob recruited.

I cleared my throat nervously from the back seat of the Nissan Patrol. These women were exactly strange to me. Their clothes and hair reeked of positively-ionised white goods culture, and my blood began thinning and rolling in a slow, bubbling simmer.

    “I know”, said another one, “they all need a bloody good hiding” she smugged.

    "Those people ahhh, well, they actually represent you." I said.

Dead silence. Seven blonde bobs turned to me. It wasn’t really a “blonde” thing, it was just their freshly applied holiday highlights glinting.

    “Some of those marchers are farmers that are only being paid a few cents for a truck load of the crops that we have to pay twenty dollars a kilo to eat, and some of those people marching are the wives whose farms have been foreclosed on by the banks, people who now have nowhere to go, and some of those marching hippies are just people who want to have a say about how much we can really afford to spend on food, and some of those people marching are small businesses and family companies that have gone broke from multi-national takeovers and enterprise bargaining decisions that are made in WTO board rooms without consultation or care about us, you know, the consumers. Oh yeah, and some of those people marching really want to talk about the diminishing GMO regulations that might jeopardise world food crops everywhere..... Monsanto,  y’know..?.”

Pause............pause, pause, pause,  pause......

    “How’s Simon’s new tennis coach, isn’t he utterly hot?”

    “Oh, well actually I’ve started playing comps on Tuesdays....”

I spent the rest of the evening staring into the laminated tabletop of the Arana Leagues Club dining room and continued to breathe in, and breathe out. I’m a forty two year old, middle-class wife and mother, and those women looked at me as if  I was on drugs, recently released from a psychiatric facility and recovering from a long stint within the criminal justice system and all I did was speak up that I think differently from the line they were taking. Why is it apparently too weird in my own local, hetero/middle class/white women's coffee clubs to really care about hunger, about horses and forests and oceans?

I know everyone’s talking. Our sales-pitched idioms rise in a radioactive steeple of unabated sound, fathomless with need and rampant sanctimony. How can one more human voice be heard, chortling and mashing in the pantheon of all these roaring souls, amassed so awkwardly among the philanthropic jaws of our tenuous and frail anxieties? In how many more complex ways can we say “Give me your money”?

    “Welcome to the Age of Aquarius, the virtual utopia,... take the philosopher’s megaphone. Speak now, or forever.......”

I stand back, (I always stood back), bending and jerking to let the hardarses grab and scuffle into where I was just standing. Standing further back, I wrestle with my resentment and pretend to let  it go.

“Here have mine....”   and they always do.

Itching with arrogance, berating my own worth with caustic apathies, I charge my glass to “selective exclusivism”. Modern materialist nihilist? No, no, I am a proud whimsician of an ironically self-deprecating guile. Perhaps I am a gentle scar, billowing through the remorse of my perceived ugly burdens, the predictable and fearful expectations of others, that of the failed, fallen and fucked up.

    “Sorry, don’t own it, I only rent it”.

 
My anger is vast, a tidal expanse, infinitely intimate with the swirling mass of my raging pain and grief, I am, at long, long, last lucidly emerging from the human submission, to clear a mist from my mind, a potently hypnotic blue-blanket that has obscured my view of reality. As I stretch, I am reacquainted with socially parasitic complacency and it’s host, the ever-consuming white culture, an obesely subterranean world where the slumbering spirit of pioneering human determination did drown.

I am fiercely awake and haunted now, by all the eyes that ever trusted and were deceived….  I have, it seems, willingly and for centuries, slavishly subscribed into a sanitised, Christianised, raped, broken, battered, burned, veiled, tormented, tortured, stifled and slain game of power-over. Are we not culturally empowered to assist those that are hungry, helpless and hurt? Have we become spiritual husks, drugged by our own rarefied economic comfort zones and  stupefied by our privileged social self-obsession? Surely the hoarding of so much wealth, the stockpiling of our multitudinous gifts and resources is literally choking us to death. Physically and figuratively. Certainly our fears have reached a critical mass.

How did our precious planetary resources become such weapons of greed and mass destruction? How has the glossy, fat, white westerner that I’ve become, been so willing to comply with the simplistic media politics that muster us endlessly into even more shallow superficiality? Why have we allowed ourselves to be motivated by self-servitude and low-range thinking?  When did we agree to become a cattle of consumer-producing strategies that cost so many their lives, their freedom, their children and their basic human rights? 

    “Larry, I’m in desperate need of some chocolate”, (and I’m in desperate need to find my three children who were kidnapped two years ago to pick cocoa beans as slave labourers until they died of starvation, torture and disease).

Where are the compassionate, intelligent leaders of our next revolution for social change? 

    “I’m sorry ma’am, I can hardly recognise you since your rhinoplasty...”

Where does an unmarried, deaf woman in East Timor learn to give birth safely, or just live simply with dignity and self-sufficiency? How does an orphaned African AIDS baby overcome his terror of the dark?

    “Sir, where do we stack all the unclaimed, unidentifiable bodies sir?

How can we continue to support our so-called democracies when our elected leaders play oligarchy, condoning and perpetuating such untold suffering? Surely we are gifted and blessed with the power to reach out and evolve, to unify in kindness now. Are we just-not-quite-yet-privileged and powerful enough in our white, male dominated  cultural wasteland to end starvation, to stop pedophilia and child pornography, to eradicate nuclear arms trade, defy global thuggery or even begin to recognise the futile stupidity and horror of war?

Can we even see our own sightlessness? Our self-serving gluttony? Our emptiness, no matter how much money and luxury we accumulate? Who will acknowledge the toxic implications and look beyond the media distortion and it’s profit-driven party line? This is the time for humanity to rise and claim it’s right to express human goodness, to know our freedoms and exercise dignified choice. Now is the time to awaken from our silence, our ignorance, our backs turned on each other, our unending greed. We must stand up and own the mess we have made now.

Contemporary culture? I look for signs and in my own hands I find stolen icons from our destroyed indigenous cultures; drum, clap stick, feather & smudge. I read the propaganda of the new age “abundance” consciousness & I feel castrated from my truest visceral female instincts, the deep instincts of recognising and flowing with our natural life-cycles, the planting times, the nurturing way, the gathering and celebrating of harvest and the deep wintering to rest and dream.
We have become unreasonably demanding of our mother’s bounty. We have stolen our religious rituals from ancestors who stepped lightly upon the earth, respectfully honouring our great and ecstatic Mother’s love and we have twisted her gifts until she has all but perished.

I smell the stench of artifice from pharmaceutical monopolies that profit in dictating the one acceptable human shape, age, colour, size and social choices, and I feel trapped and outnumbered by a hostile misogynistica.

Nature is an explosion of diversity, and we have shrunk backwards into a fearful duality life. Pepsi or Coke? Chicken or Beef? Burger King or McDonals? It’s all the same crap.

I choose to spend some time with my exquisite ugliness and it’s child, the angry pain, to draw and paint it,  to write it, sing it, drum it, dance it, wail it, wear it, share it, speak it and spear it into the hearts of all those still standing silently closed, quivering and gutless in infinite greed.

I am afraid of the struggle, unnerved by the path I have set for myself and yet I know it to be a freedom path, a path of material challenge and contrary motion.  I know now, that I have always walked this path of difference. I was born to it. 

I yearn to build a circle-fire that beckons us to the living wheel of true culture, our humanity. I ask forgiveness and I claim responsibility for all that my forebears and I have gained from the pain and suffering,  not only of my sisters and brothers of living force, but for all that I have taken from my Mother Earth without asking or giving thanks. I’m learning a better way. Thank you to the teachers in my life.

I give thanks for morning light, for wind and rain and for catastrophe, for it is in our crises that we discover our miraculous courage of human kindness.    

 
2. AFRICA - Horned Crescent of Chinyaradzo (1997)

My brother David invited me to travel to Africa to participate in a volunteer project he was very keenly involved in.  For that very precious, brief moment, I left my baby son and his small big sister with their musical, motherful father and winged across the planet to a hopeless haven for evil white supremacy and sullen, slow-boiling black pain. I spent some time in Zimbabwe, helping the QANTAS cabin crew team with some volunteered work activities at two of the sponsored orphanages in Harare, where I art-worked with such touch-hungry teenagers, and crafted with the glazed-eyed small children and cuddled those abandoned AIDS-afflicted babies, joyfully...and tearfully, right alongside my tender-hearted brother.

I’ll never forget his brimming eyes as he came racing out to find me with two such very sick bubs tucked into his enormously owning arms, he radiated such an innocent, loving essence as he tightly held those little people. I found Tracy and Goroki, and I too held those lost little beauties, in as many token arms as I could find on my being, and I wavered in shame at the thought of journeying back to my comfortably safe complacency. My own small children had given me all their teddy bears and baby toys to take to the orphaned African kids, and I knew a profound grief at placing each little gift into those cots that held such tiny, abandoned people. Babies who were never held, never spoken to, never fussed over and never long for the world, really. Most of the babies perished from AIDS. Many were brought in having been found dumped in rubbish heaps at one or two days old. All I could do was touch and touch and touch them.

After Harare, I went to Mwanga Lodge for a few days. Mwanga is an African wildlife reserve and I stayed in a beautiful little traditional bungalow that looked onto the water hole where all the reserve animals came to drink at sunset. I watched the procession of zebras and giraffes, and antelope and elephants and innumerable musk oxen and listened to the thunderous roaring of the lions just over the rise. The next day I was bitten on the thigh by a large, wild, male cervil cat in a compound that I shouldn't have been taken to. A cervil cat is like a big, dog-sized cheetah. Beautiful and razor toothed. The white American warden was a green kid, a new arrival, and next he took me to another closed off compound to meet a leopard that tried to attack me. She had just been captured and brought in after killing and eating eight villagers.

The guide ended up in the snake pit with an eight foot python strangling his arms bright blue and I had to run for help. Why weren’t there African guides to show the tourists their country, their wildlife and their perils?

The other white South African and British lodge guests had utterly snubbed me when I explained that I was visiting Africa for the privilege of contributing some time in arts activities at two of their local orphanages. I’d already been dropped like a hot rock when I admitted to being an Australian, and they had literally treated me as a leper once I’d explained my purpose for being in Zimbabwe. I’ve never been exposed to such pompous bigotry in my whole life and I’ve been to quite a few different places in the world. These people were the most ignorant that I’d ever had the misfortune to make contact with. They treated their black staff with total disdain and utter rudeness and I was so ashamed that I left the dining room and went out to the cookhouse and spoke with those beautiful African people about music, about life and about their future. I apologised that their lives were so tough and I held their hands to let them know that all white people were not the same. I knew it was a naive gesture, but it was a heartfelt, human gesture. It was all I had to give. I wanted them to know something beyond the arrogant South African whites clutching at imperial straw-remnants of a bad way that needed to end.

The simmering tension in Harare was so palpable that I was not surprised when the riots began. Qantas had to shut down the Cabin Crew Team projects, and even change their flight destinations. The wonderful people that I’d travelled with were the whole flight crew of a Qantas jumbo, right from pilot to flight attendants. We finished our trip in a meditation circle, reflecting upon the profound blessings of our shared experience. It really blew my mind and filled me with hope. 

 
3. CHINA - DRAGONBOAT IN A TYPHOON (1989)

I travelled to Hong Kong to play bass in a steamy little nightclub that was permanently packed to the rafters with US marines and English ex-patriots in a seven piece jazz combo with my dad for a few months. His regular bassist had just died from a heroin overdose.

There was so much disturbing darkness when I arrived, that I focused my whole attention on the music. The gig was six nights a week for a couple of months until they could locate a new and permanent bass player. I stayed on in Hong Kong playing in the band while my dad took a much-needed break. He had booked a really disturbing replacement pianist, an African American blues-man, without a clue on the notion of how to swing. Not one iota. There were a lot of other good players about town, so usually after the gig, I’d race off to listen, and beg to sit-in for a play wherever I could, which creatively satisfied me much more than the lacklustre gig I’d just come from.

Nervous, lung-sour smoke filled the Foreign Correspondent’s club on Tuesday nights and that’s when Alan delivered his hip, lip-service jazz and black gospel routine.

He was cool, customarily perched on the piano stool, stylishly blue upon the warm, chunky terracotta floor tiles that just lay there, lacquered, slick with puddles of a glistening adrenal secretion that rolled down the leopard legs of so many half-cut journos, those feverishly languid few, bar-posed and pissed on each other’s jet-lagged gags, crusty with the foul flecks of toxic spittle that shrivel-cast their lipless faces over Carlsbergs and clutched cynical claws around their wrinkled smokes.

The long, low, luxurious foyer lounges testified that, right here, within all that high-brow temerity, even the bonsai survive these noxious gases and just for our arse’s sakes, we murdered our brothers for a deep skin seat, just for plush and clammy landscapes of cold, hairless carcass coverings. 

“Oooh, what soft leather, let me guess,…. cow, sheep, goat, snake, deer, rabbit, kangaroo, fish, chicken, elk, buffalo, bear, tiger, panther, elephant, frog, dog, cat, koala, emu, horse or hippo? Human?”

The dining room was filled with studied sufferance. The maitre-d’ brandished fresh linen napkins as the staff practiced pleating their internal organs in fanned elegance, just to be sure, just to guarantee that the late walk back to the Star Ferry terminal would remain clear of humiliation and sudden facelessness. The walk was already steep and convoluted around the British pubs and the cancerous Hong Kong minutiae of sales pitch glare.

I needed to get off the island and make it back to Tsim Sha Tsui. By the time I arrived back at Central, it was really raining and the harbour was turning evil. The dragon had arched her back and belched a long slow stream of virulence into the Pearl estuary and all the way across the flight path into Kai Tak, and the signal nine typhoon warning had closed the airport with a snap of her jaws. Smoke curled around me and the grim faces of tired locals stared straight ahead on the gangplank as we disembarked from the ferry.

The humidity had formed a dense fog as tiny particles of south east Asia drifted in on the grey monster’s back. Hefting my bass guitar onto my other shoulder, I crossed Nathan road and slowed in the thickened wave of hurriers. The typhoon winds had streaked the green harbour with an eerie darkness that pressed us into a tension of congestion, beyond the usual pushing throngs. I was tired and desperate to get behind the doors of Chatham Court no 8.

The sidewalks were unusually difficult to manage because people were lying in the spaces outside of shops, and large white sheets were draped around, splattered with the black shouts of Chinese characters, hastily, passionately painted by an urge to speak out.

Trucks and taxis banked up into the narrow side streets, and the drenching rain made it virtually impossible to get a ride anywhere. The demonstration had begun. Every road was blocked by a river of bodies, surging endlessly through the underpass, flooding and drenching the streets of Hong Kong island with history’s next new kids on the block. Bewildered, I just joined in with the flow, and unseen hands took mine as we marched, touring for democracy, caught up, captured, inspired and stepping the way for Deng Xiao Ping to see us brandishing a bright young banner for old, tottering, cultural revolutionaries to kowtow before, a bold and awesome move for change. 

Only momentarily did I enter a Chinese symbol for youth, witnessing their vibrant dream arouse itself with an unquenchable thirst for freedom, and I watched it fall, facedown and bleeding in a whirling darkness that swelled and shaped such a gross error of judgement.

I twisted my eyes away from the sickening images of those tanks and soldiers devouring lives, crushing personality, savaging hope in the fires of Tiananmen Square, images that burned into my cells like an emblem of futility for every passion, every hope, every revolution of change.

The whole world of us looked on, powerlessly, as the broken heart of politically manipulated innocence, in every lantern of that bright dream burned, then scorched, until tiny spark-wisps and ash fragments scattered, drifting down in an icy breath of slaughter, swallowed up by the jaws of corporate communist power and it’s own brand of social control and face-loss revenge.

The Hong Kong gig finished, after which I quit playing music for a while, came home to Australia and auditioned for my next life.

 

 

...I came home to the mountain and retreated into my cave, my dark and untidy world where moss covered sticks and dangling grandfather’s beard and round rocks and piccabeen and deer skin scraps and hand-sewn bags with beads and feathers and felt lay strewn across the floor, where musical instruments tripped me on the stairs and my unfinished canvases with their eerie images peered across the room in stark gazes at the dishes and the bills piled up and the washing strewn around. I wondered how the sculptures could still dare to be grinning at the sweet sage that burned while the crystals sang along with birds, warbling into the rain that was falling from the clouds that were gathering and drifting into my lounge room, depositing their mist-drops of moisture to hang on every wall, and I sighed with enormous relief to be home.

 

The matriarch had died, skidding sideways into a void of symbolic reasoning and dire meaning a few days before Christmas. The grand dame had driven herself into a chasm, losing sight of time and life as the swell of trees blurred into a finite gathering of force and momentum, splintering under the weight of seventy eight years of......blink, gone.  The news spread with the alacrity that only occurs in small country towns, upon islands and within tiny villages that perch on the sides of steep and rocky outcrops.  The moody landscape of her own steep and rocky domain had jealously withdrawn it’s villagers to a height that just managed to slip in under the wire of what constitutes being called “mountain”.         

Such small communities seem to thrive on the sizzling currents of their local news items, often causing us to search and scramble for our places within the great wheel of allocated tidbits, socially defining our importances according to what we’d been allowed to hear, even in the wake of such grim news that was now light-speed passing from lip to lobe.

        “You’ve heard....?”

Circling helicopters and sirens had heralded her fall from firm ground to firmament and every villager within earshot had twisted in ugly shudders away from the news.  Such a surfeit of mixed emotions and swirling tales of her life-long lore rose, beckoning from the void of that sudden departure that the whispers echoed from rock to ravine until even ordinary shadows cast ominous angles in ways that no one had imagined possible.

The appropriate passage of heavy sighs and solemn sounds formed a ceremonial group mask for the villagers, and newcomers basked in an irony of scorn raised by the old-timers who felt a resonance with more authentic grief as opposed to these flighty few who knew nothing and came and went.

Death shimmered starkly from the reflected glare of summer’s sun on the protruding nails of that hastily hammered wooden crucifix, and bunches of crisping flowers lay stacked around the teetering buckets of fresher flora at the skid-scarred site of her last foothold on life. The goat-track shrine rapidly gained an identity as a grisly marker for all to ponder on their way down town, a summons to recall that small and determinedly weathered face, immeasurably shocked by the loss of control that she had probably never imagined was possible. The priveleged lee of her life was over.
    
The sky darkened on the afternoon of her death, and a swirling cloud drifted in through all of our windows and doors. I clutched that damp blanket of shrouding vapours and returned to the cloistered ache of the silent battle in my thoughts, and I trembled as all my fears snaked up my body to squeeze me in the chest while unseen stars journeyed across a covered sky.  I poured an elixir of dreams over the edge of the ravine, and onto the slow trickle of waters that meandered down and across the rocks into the valley,  and I sent up a silent prayer for the crone’s peaceful release, asking the land spirits to travel to her soul, and to help guide her away from the trauma of her death so that she could make her onwards journey,  and I gave thanks for the shelter that she’d provided when I had first come to this mountain. I’d carried around a horror–file of images and impressions from those imagined last moments of her life, and I had already tended the injuries of another villager who’d fallen and crumpled his hip in a late night vigil drink to her passing,  and whatever respite was brought to her soul, I received much comfort as I next journeyed along that precarious place.
 
It seemed that so many layers of this community had recently peeled away, falling like the fat and sudden drop of over-ripe fruit from the tree, people whose fly-blown marriages were suddenly over, people whose needy careers urgently beckoned from the radioactive glare of commercially-zoned environments, those wide-skied city lights calling to the wanderers who’d roared in and settled here, for a time.

Perhaps I’d formed a belief that this mountain selected it’s dwelling-folk, and sorted them into piles of green game-tokens, like frail human toys enchanted by the notion of discovering a nature-haven for an idealised, childrearing alternativism until the mountain spat us off, just as randomly selected personalities that, for no apparent reason were scheduled for an early release. Perhaps those that went away had simply achieved whatever it was that they came to give, or get.
    
As I now recall, I had begun to notice the silent presence of small metallic symbols and bright blue flares that hovered in front of my eyes, and flashed at me from high up in the trees at dusk, and I had begun also to sense the sticky weight of hidden threads that bound me very tightly to people and places that I really wanted to escape. In my dreams I flinched away from the scrape of blades that glinted in the claws of ancient sylphs that fluttered along the night-paths of this mountain, bearing soft grey crescents on their brows, like spidery fruit of the moon, dancing and chanting in hungry, rasping sounds. I watched them enter the lost, and transform them into the crushed and desperately unhappy. Upon waking, I began to recognise those shadowy wanters, the erogenously lithe, wispy and foul energies that crept, sly and barking and hard-baked from the stone of the mountain like bitter biscuits, endlessly searching, cold and heartless.

I first met Margaret when she called in to return a book that I’d loaned to her boyfriend, Rowan. He’d frequently come into my little shop to buy herbs and had expressed an interest in making his own natural incense, and so, I had loaned him a recipe book for making such potions. It seemed that everyone around here was a self-proclaimed alchemist, anarchist, activist and apothecary unto their own right.

We regularly gathered under the fully moon-marked local fund-raisers for the good of the mountain, the deep locals, the pagans, the broken, their benefactors, artists, ancients and the gently raving mad of the mountain, and we lived and danced together, intoxicated by the solid quiet of such rarified air. We identified ourselves as villagers, as quirky and mottled a mob as any exemplary model of an outer Brisbane fringe community.

Margaret reminded me of somebody that I couldn’t quite place. She had an accutely sharp intellect, her mind was story-filled with odd conceptual imagery and she rented a sense of humour that took me completely by surprise. Margaret’s paranoid fantasies wove a spell around me, seductively intriguing in coquettishly melodramatic undertones that confused the hell out of me as I now spent a large portion of my time answering her unhinged phone calls.

    “You must be so careful today, I’ve had signs that he’s one of THEM.”

Our conversations rapidly descended into a furtively symbolic shorthand as we lifted the lid on some mutually observed local phenomena. We both shivered with goosebumps to discover that we’d gathered such similar impressions from the silvery and abstracted voice of the forest. The first time we entered into the dark night of the trees together, we brandished our emperor’s new weapons against the evil forces of the cosmos like avenging child-rangers of the light. Rowan raised his face to the sky, and drummed our ceremony as we chanted and swayed. Each of us glowed in luminous relief at discovering ourselves returned to the archetypes of such deeply mysterious childhood games with so much ease and such little embarrassment.  

We pursued each other with an accelerated joy. Our world was a world away from ordinariness, far from the social consequences of living in close contact with the lawnmowing masses. We burst out of our repressed anxieties and played at landmagic.

    “Tonight, at dusk?”

The early summer storms of Brisbane, so typically wild at sunset, were spectacular to watch from Westridge Lookout and so we gathered, an amateur troupe of yellow-belted sages, poised unsteadily on top of Deathadder Rock to chant, to meditate and conjure a magical mantle of protection over the whole mountain range. I closed my eyes and drifted back through time.

The village had turned quite brown. I remember now, that it occurred just before Sam left to return to the city after announcing, quite suddenly, that he’d decided to go, in order to clear his mind and consider new plans.  As I now recall, I had dined with him on the eve of his departure, and the solemn awkwardness of our last conversation was tempered, only slightly, by the consumption of some very fine Victorian cabernet. Mostly we discussed trivial events, news of neighbours and associates, and the good fortune of the villagers whose houses and cottages had remained undamaged in the recent spring storms.

The wildly errratic weather had thrown the village into some quite chaotic disarray, and as I sat, now drinking with Sam, I noticed him differently, as if from a distance. We had both fallen silent, gazing into the unseasonal firelight, and I concluded that his eyes appeared to have become very dried, somewhat papery looking, and wrinkled, and that his usually ruddy complexion had significantly paled.

I had wanted to reach out and gently smooth the fine creases from his reluctant face. Sam had lately appeared to have grown thinner, his clothes had begun to drape him in even more voluminous folds than I was  accustomed to seeing upon his towering frame. His interest in his meal had been perfunctory, he’d appeared irritated by having to accommodate such a tedious task as feeding himself. I expressed some surprise at his lack of enthusiasm, and he merely shrugged and grunted.

I’d noticed the browning take place quite gradually. It was to be expected, of course, after the tremendous destruction of the trees in the terrifying October storm. Mostly their fallen timbers had been cleared, sawn, stacked and removed, and yet, the damage extended beyond the obvious nature of the broken foliage. Light now streamed in where it had previously been disallowed.

The resulting changes had caused a stark difference in the whole appearance of the road that wound it’s way through the village. Gradually, and inexorably, the impact of the bold and foreign light with the constant whipping of wind, yellowed the forest remains until it seemed that the maturation of that yellow, into tan and then brown, cast an ominous hue upon the wild grasses, the native and imported shrubs and the fallen branches and stumps.

Everything seemed to shrivel into wood-rust. I recognised it as a dangerous brown, a threatening brown, a ballistic brown that erotically tempted sparks and flames, a deeply seductive brown that beckoned roaring fire and panic in the throats of every living mountain being.
   

They shared the same birthday and he carried her into his realm of political vitriol and impassioned opinions with a primal hunger she’d never known was possible. Light-headed, and light-years younger than Vid’, she fell, gazing into his seeming world-wisdom with a pure and liquid awe. Wholly embracing his mantra, she morphed into him, a newly tamed and luscious pet, a forest changeling.  

Initially her dappled light upon his hermit’s path had seemed to nourish him with a glorious love, a radiant warmth, and his brittleness began melting away in razor shards that shattered behind him. She touched his cold and shuttered limbs with a spontaneous, joyful innocence, a soul medicine to his pain.

Vid’ almost collided into himself as quantum doorways prised open for a fraction of a chance to step away from the ugly sorrows of his past, and yet, he chose to grasp them tighter, burning so closely to his heart that his new love scorched in the full-force of his bitterness and hurt.  

I watched his sullenness return. Emulating the very same monster of cruelty from his own nightmare past, he dragged Senna into a lair of unstoppable pain. I visited them at home and discovered that Vid’ and Senna’s house was well and truly haunted. Their house was haunted by the same spirit of despair that drove some villagers to their demise, haunted by the very same spirit that cost some their sanities, eroded their safeties, mutilated their identities.

There certainly existed an entity here, so hide-bound in the hair-ring of our local legends, that a collective myth flavoured itself regularly with the herbs and spices of our every recreational ritual. At times the legend alluded back to stories of the desecration of aboriginal women’s birthing land, and on other occasions it described a bloody tribal massacre, and all of our local stories gathered momentum and embroidered in the threads of every subsequent murder and mayhem, catching the loaded lift of eyebrows as powerful reminders of any ongoing events that continued to disturb the residents. Every fight, every feud, every dumped body that appeared in our bushland, all of our disasters, whether natural or unnaturally unexplained were somehow and mysteriously ascribed to the handiwork of the ancient ones, lost souls, wandering and malevolent, troubled and angry spirits that presided upon certain ridges of the range.
 
Margaret muttered to me that the ridge-spirits only effected the men that lived here.  She said that they interfered with the men as they slept, invading their beings and driving them to a controlling coldness, so that the mountain women’s power would become diminished and then die. Mostly I figured that Margaret was just mad, suffering some leftover persecution issues from an over-dominant father or lover, but she insisted that she could tell them apart, that she could recognise them everytime they were nearby.

    “He’s definitely one of them….” she hissed at me when she first encountered  Sam, and then again upon meeting Vid’.

Perhaps I began to believe in her madness, and yet, I only ever noticed women change after they came to live here. It was only natural, because, here in the forest, we drifted in a raw and powerful state, and the dominance of the trees couldn’t help but transform us. It was their magical right to do so,  and we were filled with an urgent hunger for the very changes that the trees wrought in us. I didn’t seek to hear the sorrowsongs of my neighbours, I was filled with my own, but their sounds simply travelled to me, gliding eerily through the shimmering shapes of the forest landscape, carrying themselves high on the swirling groundmists that lifted and relocated our houses into a vanishing white lake that spilled across our unfathomably complex lives.  

Senna’s eyes turned black, encircled by a silence that clamped down on her confusion and she shrivelled inwardly whenever I saw her, backbending, lower and emptier as the months flowed by. Vid’s face pinched in and his gaunt appearance began to frighten me.

Margaret smiled at me across the chasm upon which we floated, dreaming into the valley as the darkness rapidly increased. I felt a heavy, cold weight upon my shoulder from behind, and turning my head, I was startled to see an enormous blade resting there. Rowan was gripping the handle of a full-scaled Celtic sword and I flinched as the wind picked up. I wasn’t comfortable with having a weapon waved around my head in the dusk, with the wind and the rain whipping around us as we perched upon a steep and slippery rock overlooking the valley. Combat weapons were not instruments I wanted to include in my spiritual practice, besides, the whole energy of it didn’t fit in the nature around us, I didn’t invite it and it completely jangled my peaceful state. It was then that I began to understand the clear essence of the Garumga elder’s warning. A sword was a ridiculous item to bring out here.

    “Don’t do that sword shit on me”  

Removing the blade from my shoulder, Rowan hastily retreated from “Deathadder Rock”, permanently and deeply offended by my hostile and untrusting reaction. Did that instantaneously make me one of them? I was angered by his assumption, and upset by the arrogant gesture.  I severed the thread, and the light puffed out.

 

Senna was desperately tapping on my window. Vid’ was breaking down and she needed help. We lifted him into my house, he hardly weighed anything and we lay him on the floor. Senna was trembling and Vid’ just stared. He was mumbling that an evil lived inside him, that he carried it, that it would not leave and that he could never change.

We just held him and gently rocked him. I silently called out for help until a familiar ring of bright blue starburst lights appeared in the room around us.

 

I suppose that in my own particular brand of madness, I knew that these lights, these gentle forest sprites gave succour to those in pain and I wanted Vid’ to receive their gift of healing, so that he may fall into a peaceful reverie while Senna made tea and a heavy rainfall urgently drummed on this metal roof in a hypnotic command to return to the source, to travel now to the ocean floor of all sweet dreams.

I knew that the evil trapped inside Vid’ was the scar from his past. His terrible childhood, his emotional suffering, his shame. He couldn’t ever love, because, inside, he was the unlovable, and Senna could never really know his history. Vid’ went to war. He battled inside himself for many weeks, losing Senna, losing reason and losing all touch with reality while she packed her stuff and moved back in with her dad.

Vid’ retreated into a grinding predatory condition of self-torment that fluctuated between a weeping, whimpering remorse that rapidly escalated into a ranting frenzy of violent hatred. He staked out his friends, driving insanely from one house to the next, espousing an evangelical version of the savage truth and dumping it into the laps of those that cared, and he tormented the local folk that had never known him in his more stable condition by roaring up and down the narrow streets, flinging his van around the roads in desperate and dangerous maneuvers.

Senna fled. Once Vid’ had reached his breaking point he was so exhausted by the tidal flooding of his own emotional upheaval that he withdrew into a silent and coldly unmoving man. Vid’ became a waif, a wisp, a walking stick of narrow-minded dreams.

As he departed the mountain for the last time, Vid’ had fully shred himself into a stranger, and I watched an unknown man drive away like a cool and distant breeze that blew itself far out over the canopy, on and on into the shelter of an urbanised wasteland that served him anonymously and invisibly with the changes he sought to make in his life.

Margaret is still somewhere up in the clouds, waving feathers and dripping candlewax, and orchestrating Rowan’s life, maybe just for the sake of appearances, maybe so she can know some measure of power, and yet, oddly enough, all of her insightful terrors and her own unique brand of madness give her just that.  

Power…..

This Christmas the frogs and the crickets and the owls and the birds are still chirping, warbling, popping, hooting, cackling, laughing and crying as these days fade into their own inexorable death.

Word’s out  that Troy left us in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. That creepy guy from the madhouse down behind Gumnut Grove was taken away in handcuffs. The raving clutch of poets, drunks and artists from Hene’s place are gone, the blues boys have struck camp and shuffled off to set up in deeper and different bushland, far away from here. The Friday night crowd at Tucker’s is finally and fully gone, the dreadlocked fairies have disappeared, their doof parties packed up, home-births banned, their vegetarian food forgotten, the jam nights over, the organic food stall tumbled into a pile of rotten boards.

The new face of the mountain wears a chambray shirt and sports a shiny four-wheeled drive gas-guzzling roadmonster.

I toss in my slumber, disturbed by the encroaching roar of big property business deals, trembling as the “Sims City” developers have perched themselves, squatting and slavering in the tops of trees, everywhere in the highest places, over our oceans, over the great plains and above our beautiful sacred groves to market the magnificence of our wilderness and to lord their wealth over the land and the spirit that dwells in all things. I cannot rest for the hacking, chainsawing, grading, cutting and pumping of industry that has cursed the heart of mountains and the wide valley places that we see through the trees.

 

I mourn the development of every possible scrap and parcel of land around here, the elder's strong words are ringing in my ears,

“That’s sacred land, you people got no business living up there”.

Yet, I cannot leave. I have become nourished, healed and filled in by the forest, drugged by her damp and darkened scents, my eyes have aged and deepened in the drifting Autumnal airs and I am tattooed by the crawling bite of tiny creatures across my skin. My blood is altered, I am part humus, part stone, I itch and wheeze with the blue-gum pollen that has seasonally transformed my precious rainwaters into foul-smelling cabbage soup, I am grey-blue with the furs of her Summer mould. I am home.

I know that deep down the developers will never find what they are really searching for, it is beyond their ability to know where to look, and their preoccupation with the almighty trance of money safeguards an inherent aspect of the majesty that lies beneath the very land that they crave, lies beyond the borders of their self-serving games.

This land is an enduring mother, singing to herself in the crannies of her considerable age.

 

This mother is an old land, hardier and more resourceful than all the greed-driven strategies for getting more….

I know that development applications are tearing at the seams of these remaining trees as progress winds it’s way up the very same dirt track that claimed the life of one elderly woman on her way down town.

I know that her spirit guards that way.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              ©Teone Reinthal 2005 

 

Wind - oil on canvas 100 x0 100 2003