Monday, September 12, 2011

Mr Wiggle and Mr Waggle on the road home...

What does a storyteller do? In my case I tell old tales, like Mr Wiggle and Mr Waggle, and many others to small children, school students, old folk, workers - a wide diversity of human beans. I tell folk tales, mostly from a Western European tradition as that is my cultural heritage, interwoven with personal anecdotes and stories. I listen to the stories all around. I listen to the stories moving around a place and in the voices of the people who are the listeners to my tales. I listen to the stories that bubble out of the children and adults who are participating in storytime. I listen for the stories that light people up and the ones that illuminate the story space and the ones that are not told, the silent stories, that inhabit the space around the told stories. I do not know these stories, because they have not been told, but I do know their absence and how that changes the stories that are present. For example, the stories that my father did not tell about his war experiences took up as much space, and at times more space, than the stories he did tell. So it is with stories and the way they move around the landscape.

I know how I dance with these stories. Every time I tell Mr Wiggle and Mr Waggle, or the Gingerbread Man, or The Silent Princess, or The Galah Tree or the Glass Cupboard - I dance the words around the space where the listeners sit. The words fall around them, I pick them up and throw them back, I listen and change them according to the contributions from the audience, I laugh and add some ancient language from an old, old version of the tale, a word like 'pedlar' or 'cobber' or even a place name like Yackandandah. The listeners will add their bits too. Children just call them out as their enthusiasm overflows. They make up words or call their current favourites like 'Higgle piggle', 'Humpybong'. They play with the language and that is the point. Language belongs to us, we created it, we can play with it, change it, innovate. The story space is the place to claim language for your own - and for children to be able to play confidently in their first language is all about identity, family, culture and articulating who I am and where I come from.


So it is with everyone in the story space, regardless of age. We dance the words, recreate the story every time it is told. As the teller it is my job to give the story up for reinvention every time. To share the delight, the poignancy, the nonsense and the profound truth which rests in each of the old folk tales. Spoken story never stays the same. If it did it would never survive, except as print on a page and then it is a different story - it is written, not spoken, and will be reinvented individually by the reader. The storyteller keeps the story moving, relevant to the audience that hear it across time and make it new, each time.


Toot Toot and I go up the hill and down the hill, up the hill and down the hill, across the landscape, along the New England Highway. Ironically I have lost my voice since catching a nasty case of flu in Wodonga while staying with Kirsty and Jarrah and dancing our way through stories together. The told and the untold stories that sit with dear friends and family while we watch the delight of Jarrah, at two and a half, tell us who he is and dance his story.


Wodonga, Gundagai, Canberra, Goulbourn, Oberon, Bathurst, Wattle Flat, Ilford to Lake Windemere and Mudgee. Up the hill and down the hill, up the hill and down the hill...























Thursday, September 1, 2011

The Australian War Memorial - a different sort of journey...

It has taken me some time to write about the War Memorial. That is a Lancaster bomber in the photo. My father flew these, and other bombers, during the second World War. This seems an impossibly long time ago now, but in my childhood it wasn't that much longer than the decade that has just been marked since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Between 1943 and 1945 my father was part of the Australian Bomber squadrons that flew over Europe and tried to wipe out the industry of Germany. He was aged nineteen to twenty one. I used to think that he was too young then to have done anything really dangerous, or courageous. At the War Memorial, it says the average age of the young Australian pilots was twenty. 20. Let me tell you about what I remember of my father just now. He used to throw back his head and laugh out loud. His laughter moved his whole body. He used to say 'Whackothedidlio' and when watching the Broncos, he would lean forward and say, 'you beauty' in a long and drawn out exclamation. YOU BEAUUUTYYY. When we were small he taught all five of us to body surf, guaging the right moment to throw our body into the curve of the wave and ride with absolute delight into shore. On the edge of the surf, when we were even smaller, his legs were like pylons, dug deep in the sand, that we would roll and squirm and knock up against. He would stand there with the other dads, on the edge, while all us kids chased waves and dug holes that filled with salty water so quickly we would almost miss the shells that were sucked down and buried. From time to time he would lean down and pick one of us up and swing us high above his head, onto his shoulders, to scan the deep sea past the breakers for smugglers. At the end of the day, after dinner and before bed, when it was dark he would sit with us on the dunes again and look for the smugglers lights far out in the ocean. Our family played this game for years, then he played it with his grandchildren too, scanning the dark of Bribie Passage for lights blinking a code to shore.
Years later, as his time here was almost done, I found some old black and white photos from his youth. A group of young men in uniform larking around, smoking, smiling at the camera and each other. On closer scrutiny I recognised some of my father's friends - the other dads from the beach and the bar-b-ques, the beer garden and the park on Cracker Night. We talked together about the photo and for the first time in all those years he pointed to other faces and said, "He didn't come back. He didn't come back. Either did he or he." And I started to sink into the grief and the shock, the sadness and the courage of those young bomber pilots that flew off in the night, all those decades ago, and did not know if they would make it back. At the War Memorial it said that of the 10000 young Australians in the bomber squadrons, more than 3500 did not come back. I cannot remember the exact figures but the death toll was staggering.
Those that did come back built a life, determinedly, had large families and did not talk about those years. At least not to us, their children. My father did not go to Anzac Day, though he did play in the Army and Navy Cup at golf, with the other faces from the photo, the ones that did come back to inhabit my childhood neighbourhood, to cheer their footy teams, and their childrens and grandchildrens.









What was that about a journey?

Infinite Horizons - the Fred Williams exhibition at the National Gallery in Canberra, captures how my journey has been for the last week. Toot Toot and I have been making our way across the landscape with a little help from Sean, my Irish GPS. The landscape has changed at every turn - colours, hillsides dotted with trees and livestock, woods and forests that crowd all around and most of all a breathtaking climb through the mountains from Goulburn to Oberon and on to Bathurst. At times on this drive as I made my way across a plateau above the Abercrombie River National Park I was surrounded by newly felled forests that stretched away to a horizon outlined by mountains in the deepest of blues. The road wound round and round with treacherous drops at the side and Toot Toot followed my every turn with steadfast determination. Then we would plunge down into the valleys and cross streams amidst tall timber again and the dappled sunlight and shadow was indeed like a Fred Williams kaleidoscope. Colour, colour all around, light and dark.

But before I set off from Goulburn I was in Canberra for three days. Sean was not much use to me in Canberra as I did not have exact addresses or even any idea where I was most of the time. Partially this is because of a bad childhood memory of being lost in Canberra on a family holiday while my parents struggled to navigate around the city circles. We would see the monument, or the hotel, but could never quite find our way there. This time I thought I would be fine with Sean to help, but that did not work out. So I left the car at the van park and took buses at first this worked fine. The Fred Williams exhibition was exquisite and I spent hours at the National Gallery. By the time I got to go to the War Memorial I had enough courage to take Toot Toot again and believe it or not, we found it no worries...