Josie Stone

Left this world Wednesday 25th March 2009. R.I.P. dear friend.

The world is a much better place because you were here.





Remember 
by Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
 Gone far away into the silent land;
 When you can no more hold me by the hand,
 Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
 Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
 Only remember me; you understand
 It will be late to counsel then or pray.
 Yet if you should forget me for a while
 And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
 A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
 Better by far you should forget and smile
 Than that you should remember and be sad.

On Barbara Temperton’s Southern Edge by John Kinsella

Barbara Temperton is interested in where folklore and folktales intersect with fact and reportage. She has taken tales that come out of specific locations — especially around Albany and the surrounding coastline — and merged the figurative and the narrative. She tells tales in verse, but that is not all she does — she shifts the stories, language, and locations of these tales to make them much more than the sum of their parts. In Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook, F, D. L. Ashliman looks at why ‘we tell stories’ under the following headings: ‘fantasy wish fulfilment’, ‘expression of fears and taboos’, ‘explanation’, and ‘education’. One might add more than this to the list, certainly in the case of Barbara Temperton’s reinvigoration of the form, but in essence these aspects are all present in the three stories told in Southern Edge. 

Before progressing, it should be noted that ‘Southern Edge’ refers literally to the coastline that looks down on Antarctica, though we read that land and sea, indeed body and sea (and nature in general) are interconnected and fluid. Each of the characters in the three narratives that make up the book flow in and out of the seascape and landscape to varying degrees. The narrative voices also flow in and out of the stories. In the second story, ‘The Gap’, which refers to probably the best-known coastal feature in the south-west, the male narrator charts his relationship of addiction in terms of love, obsession, admiration, and drug addiction with Julz, a junkie who is also, in essence, a free spirit. It’s a perverse freedom, though, as her talismanic and shamanistic exchange with the natural world comes at a great cost — to her, and to the young male narrator. Woven through the story are reportages of loss extracted from local newspapers, signs, and other sources, that set the tale against a background of fact. In a dreamlike montage of events and moods, the stories of Everyperson are reflected through the love story of Julz and the narrator. 

This technique is also at work in the other two narratives, each of which relies on the other in their telling. Julz, whose living and isolation spread across the folkloric space, is a form of natural bridge in one sense, but also the froth and foam of the never-ending crush of the water within the Gap. I don’t say this lightly — in Temperton’s book the oneness of the elements and characters is absolute. And those who are outside this merging are ciphers. Julz is archetypal female renegade free spirit who even affirms the feminine in the male farmer-fisherboy narrator figure. This figure is an unreliable narrator, as we shift outside and around his viewpoint at times, in an eclogic way. 

Moving back from the centre to the beginning, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife’, we also find a shamanistic figure in the lighthouse keeper, mostly absent from the narrative but omnipresent in the mood of the piece. Reversing the vulnerability of such positions, this is the God-like figure who controls the elements, including his wife. She, in her loneliness of kerosene tins and domestic duties in isolation, reaches out for others. Her need for love is ultimately defined by the sea, though, and indeed, by extension, her husband. Her escapes are illusory. 

In fact, each of the tales is tragic in this way — the characters are not able to find the liberation they seek, trapped by their own emotions and by the natural world of which they are part. The lighthouse keeper is the magician who controls the sea but not his wife on one level, but ultimately neither escapes from the ‘roles’ that the sea has forced on them. Even one of the wife’s lovers, Knute, who loves and leaves her, will come back to her in the context of an elemental death: he will remember her as his life flashes past him in the pocket of air in an overturned boat far away. What the lighthouse keeper’s wife searches for is unfindable but paradoxically archetypically present. 

The final tale in the book takes us to the Kimberley, but ultimately back to the southern edge as we follow the ‘traveller’ in his escape from himself and the forces of ‘nature’ embodied in the bird woman. A psycho-sexual drama of denial, it confronts us with the uncertainty of responsibility for a crime which the traveller might or might not have committed. The tale is montaged through a variety of prosodies and narrative techniques. We are intimately inside the seeing and experiencing of the (male) traveller, his observations of the bird woman, his sexual confusion and frustration and inevitable ‘consummation’, shifting to witness statement, through to fragments of narrative and imagery driven by journeying south — from the scene of the crime — that implicate elements of the earlier stories, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife’ and ‘The Gap’. The merging of fluids — sexual fluids, blood, the ocean (the body of the bird woman literally melts into the ocean only held together by a cloak — she is like a bird killed by an environmental disaster — she has been polluted) — blurs the boundaries between cause and effect, between land and sea, between crime and folklore. 

We are able to accept even the most horrendous crime as symbol and tale when it recedes into the past and is told and retold through symbol, allusion, and archetypes. That’s how community absorbs the distressing and the disturbing. These tales are about women, about the isolation, the vulnerabilities and strengths, the archetypal feminine, and the mythologies of the female body and its oneness with the earth, water, and air. Temperton is not interested only in critiquing or verifying such mythologies, but in investigating how and why stories like this are told. The work is very sensitive and highly attuned. Its presentations of gender are complex in that male and female are defined so clearly, are counterpointed, and yet they blur in terms of time and the elements. 

Barbara Temperton has managed that rare thing, finding a methodology to present stories in verse that are also mosaics of impression and intimate observation of specific places. She has a pinpointing eye for local detail, and can actually make her characters seem real although mythological. She manages to finely balance sexual menace and sexual joy — the undercurrent of sexual threat as cautionary tale is at the basis of so many folk stories. Our sense of time is altered and the stories themselves become timeless. And yet the details are so specific to time and place. That’s a skill. It might be Bald Head near Albany, or ‘an old Morris mounted on blocks’ or a detail as clinically specific (for the witness statement) as the ‘Northern/Southern Hemispheres Bird Migration Study’). Great care has been paid to lineation — the lines vary from pared-back imagistic glimpses to longer prose-poem-like flowings in which the story is told at a steady pace. 

To conclude, I’d like to say the overwhelming feeling this book left me with was that loss is a trauma we tell stories to overcome. The bird woman was about to leave the traveller as she’d finished her project, and the reader is shocked by what ensues. Either way, the traveller’s loss is given focus, not as excuse but as a vehicle for the way stories might be told. In ‘The Gap’, the narrator is left stranded between his ideal of Julz and the brute reality of the situation, and the lighthouse keeper’s wife tragically never escapes her isolation but her longings remain so intense that she wishes to destroy her singing, her voice, to, in essence, stop ‘telling’ the tale: 

Kerosene smudges everything 

with its hazy-blue skin, 

is the lighthouse’s other tenant, 

always present, never seen, 

a bitter layer on the lips 

after she kissed her husband’s hand. 

Remembering the children’s dog 

barking until its voice was gone, 

she wonders how long she could scream 

before she would not make another sound. 

The irony is that each of these tales needs to be told — needs to account for all the tales of pain that could not be told by those who experienced them. This is how story and poetry can become universal.

(Posted by permission of John Kinsella, presented at the Geraldton launch of Southern Edge, 13 February 2009, Geraldton-Greenough Regional Library)

Creative Writing/Poetry exercises for primary students

Janet, Here's a couple of creative writing exercises that I've used for primary school children (suit grades 5-7). They are variations on adult ones. I thank Glen Phillips for introducing me to poster poems way back around 1990. 1. Writing through the senses (Can be individual poems, but a lot of fun writing as a group - use a whiteboard/blackboard) Describe an object, one or two lines each for Sight Sound Taste Smell Touch (can add others, e.g. balance) plus, Intuition (what one knows about the object) 2. Poster Poems Need newspapers they can cut up, glue sticks, scissors, and a A3 sheet of card, if available (photocopy paper will do if nothing else is available) Introduce the class to simple poetic patterning techniques, e.g. alliteration, sibilance, consonance, assonance, rhyme. Look at the newspaper headlines, find examples of poetic patterning techniques in the headlines (can look for simile and metaphor as well if you think the class is up to it, but don’t introduce too many concepts in one go). Some examples of headlines: LAPTOPS FOCUS OF FLIGHT PROBE, ICONIC IMAGE OF WA WORTH ITS SALT, ALARM AT LEVEL OF FEMALE SILENT SUFFERING, FIT HADLEY HUNGRY TO BOOST THE BLUES (The West Australian and The Sunday Times are good source) Have the students cut out the headlines, or parts of headlines to make a poem. Get them to lay the pieces out, shuffle them around, make the poem before they stick it onto their paper. Once finished they can decorate the rest of the page by cutting out pictures or drawing on it. Then: Have an exhibition of the works! You can take this a stage further, if there’s time. Have the participants write the poem out or type it up and then start refining it further by rearranging words and phrases, adding their own words and deleting those that don’t serve the poem well.

Where Rocks are Other Things: anthropocentrism and landscape

an·thro·po·cen·tric (nthr-p-sntrk) adj. 1. Regarding humans as the central element of the universe. 2. Interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience. 

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/anthropocentrism 25/02/2009) 

A practical demonstration of anthropocentrism is to be found in the naming of prominent features of the landscape. For example: “The Sleeping Lady”, being a local name for the eastern slope of Mount Watkins in the Hamersley Ranges, describing the profile seen when approaching from the west, or “Cathedral Pool” being the name given to a rock pool in Wittenoom Gorge that lies cupped to the underbelly of an cliff, the eroded face of which evokes the ceiling vaults of a cathedral.

In the mid 1930s, The Albany Advertiser published the articles “Strange Rock Formations” (1935, 49-50) and “Where Rocks are Other Things” (1936) in which local rock formations were described as “freaks” and in anthropocentric terms. On their list were: Dog Rock, Shark or Eagle Rock, Pulpit Rock, Helmet Rock, Devil’s Gap, Natural Bridge, Boat Rock, Wagon Rock, Koala Rock, one described as looking like a chimpanzee, another like a snarling dog’s head. The name of a particular feature of the landscape may be anthropocentric, but - when it comes to particular speaking positions, in terms of discourse - they can be even more specifically so. The prominence at the eastern edge of the Gap is referred to by the National Park Ranger as “Gorilla Head Rock”, whereas rock climbers call it “Sea Wolf”. The discourse of rock climbers, a vocabulary specific to their activities, in which every rock face and every variation of climbing it has an individual name, also offers possibilities for poetic transformation. Rock faces are walls, wave-ledges are platforms, boulders can be blocks, protrusions, flakes. In South Coast Rock: Guide to Rock Climbing on WA’s South Coast, author Shane Richardson describes Climb 15 on the Natural Bridge’s “Orca Wall“: Climb the slightly overhanging, left trending lay back crack (the stomach of the ‘diving killer whale’) to finish up the thin crack above. (23) The naming of aspects of landscape in familiar terms renders the unknowable known, the unfamiliar familiar. Likewise, story attempts - by filling in the gaps (no pun intended) - to make the unknowable known. The local narrative describing underwater caves at the Gap (used in my poem “The Gap” in Southern Edge) arose from an attempt to explain how a woman could vanish completely. An alternative angle is that some local narratives are actually cautionary tales, arising not from historical events but because the contemplation of a feature of the landscape incites the viewer to imagine potentiality, the possibility for harm. Another perspective offers the possibility of redemption, she is not dead but alive in the caves from which there is the likelihood, like other women vanished into the underworld (such as Persephone and Eurydice, for example) that with some kind of upper-worldly intervention she might emerge alive. There are many areas on the Australian coastline called the Gap. Sydney’s is notorious. In fact, most sites bearing the name, and similar names, are notorious. Dare we entertain the notion that reputation (and story, in this case) is semantic, that it could be linked more to a name than it is to a place? Fact or folklore? It is almost impossible to say. These days, suicides on this area of the South Coast do not receive media coverage, and therefore most information, true or false, is related through the gossip-network, where after much repetition and elaboration stories of suicides are more legend than “truth”. In view of the mobility of urban legend, it isn’t inconceivable that these “local” legends, restricted to a degree by the requirement for certain features of the landscape to be present, might move from place to place, attaching to certain features of landscape rather than specific places. The Gap at Albany hasn’t always been the focus of white people’s local lore. In fact, until the construction of an adequate access road for vehicles in the 1930s – built to encourage tourism in the Albany area – the Gap was barely accessible except by a rough walk trail. In documentation from that period, the zawn is christened “Devil’s Gap”. Compare the semantics of the name “Devil’s Gap” with that of its neighbour “Natural Bridge”. The contradictions are ironic indeed. The name “Devil’s Gap”, metaphorically loaded with Christian foreboding, is attached to the place which appears to be the most dangerous - all froth and noise, unpredictable winds, waves thundering into the crevasse. Yet, statistics appear to show that most people who die in that particular area are washed to their deaths by surges sweeping under the seemingly benign “Natural” Bridge. From: The lighthouse keeper's wife, and other stories ; and, Ceremony for ground : narrative, landscape, myth

Ian Nichols reviews Southern Edge

Ian Nichols reviews Southern Edge in West Weekend Magazine (The West Australian), Saturday 21 February 2009: "The three narrative poems in this book explore reactions to loss, death and disappearance. They paint the situations and responses with a delicacy that is reminiscent of watercolour paintings; nothing harsh, softly edged, but nevertheless effective. The wife of a lighthouse keeper shares the death of her children in imagery that wavers as the light on the sea. A troubled couple explore their relationship against a mirror of the Southern Ocean, and one of them vanishes. A jetty becomes a palimpsest of traveller's tales. All this is written with a truly remarkable lyricism which has earned Barbara Temperton recognition and many awards."

She’d looked back at Bald Head slipping south behind them, the peninsula a whale plunging into the Southern Ocean, saw its eye-shadow cast on fractured granite — the beast looking back at her. (from "The Lighthouse Keepers Wife", Southern Edge, Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Press, 2009.)

Snake City

It was late winter, several years ago, the early wildflowers were putting on a pretty spectacular display. I planned a walk on the Bibbulman track, from Shelley Beach across West Cape Howe to Bornholm Beach Road and back. None of my regular walking partners wanted to come, so I decided to go alone. I thought walking alone would be a great opportunity for thinking through an issue which had been troubling me. I’d recently become aware that I had become quite distracted and unproductive, obsessed with a matter which was consuming all my energy and going nowhere.

I parked my car at Shelley’s Lookout and headed bush. I was about a kilometre and a half into the walk, all uphill, stopped to rest at the top of a hill and realised with a shock that I’d left my hat in the car. I had a choice of going back to get it or going on without it - it was a warm, sunny day. I thought it wiser to turn around. Setting out for the second time I climbed the hill again. Now completely warmed up, I set off down the dirt track at a pretty fast pace. I rounded a corner and met a snake coming down the track in my direction! The snake went left into a cluster of rocks, I went right. A little further along another snake crossed the track in front of me. Then a few moments later, going downhill on steps formed with logs, I step onto a log and disturbed a snake on the other side. I tried not to be distracted by the acres of bush in flower around me or by the insidious way my walking rhythm lulled me into the world of my thoughts, several more times I was jolted back to reality by rustles from the bush alongside the track, snakes retreating into the scrub or travelling downhill ahead of me. After some time spent crossing around the back of West Cape Howe, I reached the coast. The Cape to my left, the wild Southern Ocean in front, and Bornholm Beach curving away to my right. I stood absolutely spellbound. Yes, I thought, God was here, recently. I don’t know why I looked down, but there on the track right beside me was a snake, sunbaking. I went North, the snake went South. I kept going. The walk was proving tougher than I’d imagined it would be. A lot of it was uphill, and one of those hills was a real challenge. I laboured up it, one man-made step after the other, and half way up disturbed another snake! I was breathless for more than one reason. After that, it was a cruisey walk downhill and along a winding but flat track to Bornholm Beach Road, a sandy four-wheel drive track. I sat on a log at the side of the track, rested and ate my lunch. It seemed to me I’d been receiving warnings via the snakes all morning, as though something was saying: Pay attention. Barbara, pay attention! I turned around, resolving to make as much noise as I could, to sing, to shout, to recite poems, to walk loud, to make sure those snakes were long gone by the time I got anywhere near them. I had a good time, composed some awful song lyrics, sang until I was hoarse, walked myself into a strong, comfortable rhythm. But, without realising, I’d stopped the noise making. My thoughts busied themselves with my current obsession and I slipped into that rhythm that walking long distances gets you into, where you cover the ground without really being present. The pace is steady and fast. Too quiet. The tiger snake was standing on its tail in the middle of the track and striking when I saw it! I don’t know how, but despite the speed of my forward momentum I flew backwards! I stopped. Terrified. My heart felt as though it would thump its way out of my chest. Stand still! Don’t run! Stand still! The snake half-dropped to the ground, head swaying slightly. I thought it might charge at me. It looked like it was going to charge me … then it wavered and veered off into the scrub at the side of the path. God! Oh, God! Fear cemented my feet to the ground. I don’t know how long I stood there before I began to think rationally. Move! And I launched myself from that spot, ran full pelt past the place where the snake had left the path and I ran until I couldn’t run any more and then I walked and I never took my eyes off the track not even for a for a milli-second and I jumped at every lizard, every bee, every dragonfly, screamed when a feral cat shot out of the heath and into a cluster of peppermints. About an hour later, approaching the crest of the last hill before the descent to the Lookout car park, I hesitated. The track was bordered by heavily eroded limestone rocks, it was late afternoon and the shadows were lengthening. That first snake? I drove down to the beach and sat in the car shaking, watching the waves come in. I just watched the waves come in.