would you mind coming with me, miss...

When I was young, stupid and virile - yes, girls can be virile too - my friend and I got quite drunk and went to the diviest nightclub in town at 2 am. It was called Stilettos and over the door was a neon sign that said Stilettos in the shape of a shoe (I guess that's in case you thought they meant the blade). 

Inside, they had one of those new-fangled lighted disco floors. It looked a lot like this: 

Except the people were wasted and their clothes were not nearly so nice.

My friend and I decided we didn't want to put down our beer glasses as we danced on the new-fangled floor with one arm keeping the beat above our heads.

The Stilettos bouncers decided they didn't want us to dance with one arm above our heads whilst waving a big beer glass over the new-fangled lighted disco floor with the other hand. 

We thought they were party poopers.

My friend, a very tall woman with a loud mouth when intoxicated, was vocal about the differing desires of ourselves and the owners of the new-fangled lighted  disco floor. After a verbal altercation, she was frog-marched out the front door with her arm twisted up behind her back by a large bouncer while I had no choice but to follow along meekly since I am short and no threat at all to an ex-SAS soldier.

 (well, that's what he looked like anyhow) 

My friend and I would laugh every time we thought about it for years afterward; how the hell did we manage to get ourselves thrown out of the place with the lowest behavioural standards in the entire world, a place where people go to drink and dance, and for what heinous crime were we ejected? Why, drinking and dancing, of course. 

I also got kicked out of a fitness class last year. That was pretty funny. 

Basically the instructor was fresh out of 20 years as an army Warrant Officer and he hadn't quite adjusted to the fact that we civilians were not going to hop to his every command as soon as he made it. 

Have you seen Major Payne? 

I am kind of a 'free spirit' at the best of times, but try barking in my face at 6 am when I'm wearing trackies. 

No good can ever come of it.

Check out my novel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Anzac-Girl-ebook/dp/B004VS7I8E

my worst job ever...

It was the worst and also the shortest. It was on a line at a scalloping factory. I was sixteen.

To get this fantastic position, I stood outside the scalloping factory at 6 am. The Man came around at 6:30ish for a 7 am start and pointed to about 10 of us. We all marched inside, then we were lined up along a conveyor belt and told to pick off the Bad Scallops as they went past us. I had never actually seen a scallop before, so I really wasn't sure what the difference between a Bad Scallop and a Good Scallop was and so, I asked. The Man told me to ask the woman next to me. I did. Unfortunately, the woman next to me didn't speak English. I turned to the woman on the other side of me. She didn't speak English either.

A terrible mechanical sound began suddenly, so loud you literally could not hear yourself shout. I know this to be true because later in the morning I tried it, with mixed results. A disgusting looking belt began its 10 hour long journey, round and round, carrying scallops through the production line before plopping them into cans at the end.

Did I mention that I hate seafood? Did I mention that the smell was utterly rank? There were four of us in the Picking Off The Bad Scallops section and I observed what the others were doing in order to better understand what a Bad Scallop might look like. Please, don't ask me because I don't remember - I've blotted the details out of my mind. The sound tore at my ear drums, the scallops shells cut through my rubber gloves, the smell kept my tummy in a state of constant alert, as if it were saying, 'Now? Did you want me to hurl now?' But well, I'm smart. After a short while, I figured it all out and I was picking those Bad Scallops off that belt like I was born to it.

I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this before, but I'm a compulsive singer. I sing ALL THE TIME. I had a friend at school who used to punch me in the shoulder and say, 'Stop. Fucking. Singing!' at least once a week. So once I'd got a rhythm going and felt I could eradicate those Bad Scallops without having to think too much, what do you suppose I did? I began to sing. Really, really loud, because as I mentioned earlier, I couldn't hear myself over the machinery. I don't remember what I was singing but taking into consideration the year and the place and the shoutiness required, it was very probably KISS's I-I-I want to Rock'n'roll all night... AND PARTY EVERY DAY!

I don't know how long I did this for but I do know that everybody on that production line went off into their own little world as they attended to the scallops and their canning. I checked, you see, as I began to sing. I checked to see if anyone would see me and think poorly of me, perhaps even punch me in the shoulder like my school friend, Robyn, used to. But no, nobody cared, they were all off in whatever place it was that allowed them to endure the scallop line.

So, I really got into it. It helped a lot to be able to sing really loud knowing nobody could hear me. It made it almost bearable. Until, smoko time when all the machinery cut out with a single switch bringing sudden, utter silence.

Well, silence except for me shouting a Kiss song at the top of my lungs, of course. I don't know how many words I sang into that deafening void. It doesn't matter - one was too many. Every head in that dark grey factory swung to look at me like The Terminator hearing the name Sarah Connor. I have done some crazy things in my life and I have been looked at like I was an total nut many times. But never like this. NEVER. LIKE. THIS.

I then made a fatal mistake, but hey, I was 16 years old and as yet, had not seen Bootmen or The Full Monty, both of which clearly demonstrate what a working class person should do when caught in this kind of situation. The best course of action is to sing even louder and start leaping all over machinery whilst making jazz hands.

Alas, I froze like a sea-wombat caught in the navigation lights of a scalloping boat.

I thought I knew what humiliation tasted like. I thought being the new kid at half a dozen separate schools had shown me the sharp edge of social disapproval. That was child's play. Those scalloping women were not amused, not even slightly, by my anti-social facsimile of joy. I looked around at those bleak angry faces and was overwhelmed by a visceral experience that can best be expressed by these words: GET ME OUT OF HERE NOW OR I WILL DIE.

I made my way to the toilet and sat down on the closed lid. What was I going to do? I couldn't stay there the rest of the day. I just couldn't. I couldn't tell the boss that I couldn't stay there for the rest of the day because I was about a month out of school and I thought the rules were the same.

That is, that if I went to him and said, 'Hey, I've changed my mind about this job and I'm going home,' he would behave like a teacher and say, 'Oh, no, you're not. You will finish this day and then when it's done, you'll go to the office and write fifty times 'I must not sing on the production line'. Anyhow, my traumatically embarrassed sixteen year old brain came up with the only sensible solution - I stood on the cistern and pushed open the high toilet window.

Being young and agile, I slithered out like a snake and ran across the back yard of the factory and out the back gate. This took me into a strange, urban no-man's-land of warehouses and 6 foot wire fences. I kept running. Just like Forrest Gump. I don't know why. I guess I thought they could do something to make me go back.

Yeah. I was a weird kid. Some would say that the only thing that's changed is that if it happened today, I wouldn't have a hope of getting out that window.


Check out my novel, The Anzac Girl, on Amazon: 
The Anzac Girl

Bob Dylan and me

I spend a lot of time on my favourite website Quora. It's a question and answer site and today someone asked this question: 

What is the most memorable sound that you have heard in person? 

This is my answer:

Bob Dylan playing Like A Rolling Stone in about 2008 in Melbourne. 

Melbourne is at the other end of the country from me and I didn't have a lot of money, but when I heard he was touring - a very rare thing here in Australia - I decided I was going. I paid plane fares, a week's holiday in a St Kilda unit and about 200 bucks for a Gold Section ticket which put me about 6 rows away from the stage. 

It was a high point in my life. That may sound a bit sad, but I have loved Bob Dylan's music since I was 16. I'm a country-folk singer/songwriter myself and Dylan is my musician the way The North QLD Cowboys are my football team - only moreso. 

I found the whole experience emotionally moving. After he'd left the stage, despite the outcrying of ENCORE, ENCORE, the lights went down and there was worry that maybe he wouldn't be back. He's notoriously unpredictable in his stage performances.The audience had nearly given up and the cheering had begun to die away. 

But then, there was a shuffling around on the stage and the first bars of Like A Rolling Stone came out of the darkness and I got tears in my eyes. 

I remember quite distinctly thinking, 'That's Bob Dylan, right there, playing Like A Rolling Stone.' 

I dreamed about him that night. He was in the crowd with me as I walked away from the venue, walking next to me as if he were just one of the other concert goers. He said quietly, in that raspy American twang of his, 'I'm really glad you finally got to see me play.' 

I took his elbow like we were on a date and said, 'Me too.'

 

Check out my novel: The Anzac Girl

If a UFO offered to take you into space, would you go?

                            

I wouldn't. No. 

If I'd been abducted before I was 22 and had my first child, I would probably have shouted, 'Beam me up FASTER, Scotty.' But no, certainly not now. 

My father always told us that he would go in a heartbeat if he could, no matter what the cost and I believe him; I don't think he would balk were he put on the spot. If aliens, or some secret government program, needed an eccentric old guy who'd spent a lot of years tinkering in his garage on a perpetual motion machine and asked him along, he would be like, 'Can I just tell my wife where I'm going?'

And they would be like, 'I'm sorry, sir, but that's classified.'

And he would be like, 'No worries - she'll understand.' 

I'm pretty sure she would, too.

How about you? 


Check out my novel: The Anzac Girl

my name is Christine and I am a footy-head...

There's something my friends should know about me: I like rugby league football. 

When I say I like rugby league, that's not entirely true. I like to watch my home team play and I like the State of Origin. The game itself is kind of weird - homo erotic but with a culture of denial regarding this that borders on the homophobic. It is filled with incredibly BUILT young men most of whom remind me of Pooh - they are bears of very little brain and long words bother them. 

The game that I now describe took place some years ago, but it has always stuck in my brain because my team, the North Queensland Cowboys had made it into the finals and I was there to witness it.

What can I say except...

COW-BOYS! COW-BOYS! COW-BOYS!

On this particular night, my three footy-head friends and I got tickets for the first semi final. It was a grudge match against the Bulldogs.

What can I say except...

BOO! BOO! BOO! THE DOGGIES.

The Doggies are the dirtiest team in the league. Everybody agrees - except Doggie fans, of course.

The Cowboys are the shining outsiders - most of the teams are based in Sydney, filled with city and suburban lads. But the Cowboys hail from the Far North of the country, where men are men and women eat their young. Several of our star players grew up on remote indigenous communities.

In particular, there are these two cousins, God love 'em - gorgeous young guys, shy of the press, but always smiling, raised together in a community called Hopevale right up on the pointy bit of Oz where few but traditionally raised Aboriginal people and Steve Irwin types venture. When they play together, they are psychic - each knows exactly what the other is going to do next and you can see that everyday of their childhood was spent running around barefoot in the backyard throwing a footy to each other.

So our trip to the footy has been arranged all week. Usually we watch it on H's big screen TV. You get a better view of the game on telly - everyone knows that. BUT you get the atmosphere when you go to the ground.

H got the tickets early in the week. Section 333, seats 1,2,3 and 4 in row X of the southern most grandstand. Hmmm... That didn't sound so good.

We rendezvous at H's place at 17:00 hours. I am dressed in a navy and white shirt with a grey windcheater.

But the Cowboy colours are navy, white grey and yellow.

I have no yellow!

Damn! I feel naked. I am a BAD Cowboy supporter. 

We jump in H's car - she is a freak, and has an actual Cowboys jersey on and carries flags and signs and bemoans the sad fact that she didn't have time to paint her face.

We drive to the shopping centre nearest the ground to stand in an orderly queue of similarly dressed people and wait to fill the buses which leave one after the other to take us to the ground.

Everyone is excited but nervous. You'd think we, ourselves, were playing. I get a little people buzz on - I'm not someone who enjoys crowds for the sake of it but a football crowd is exciting to be in. You soak it in. The old guys who played footy in their youth, the middle aged women who have lost their sense of decorum and no longer feel embarrassed to want to watch their favourite gladiators run into battle and best of all the little kids, clutching their flags and bouncing on the seats like they need to pee. Here and there, on the buses, small brave pockets of resistance fighters - lone Doggies supporters in sky blue and white, some so loyal, they have traveled across the country for one game of footy.

Once at the ground, we went forth on the long trek to find section 333, row x, seats 1,2,3 and 4. Well. We are in the very top row at the very far corner of the furthest stand. 

Surprisingly, that's okay. That means we can beat on the corrugated iron backing of the stand when we get really excited - it makes a sound like thunder. There's a giant screen to watch the close action on. When the fireworks go off, they are at eye level with us. Fantastic.

In in front of us, a row of foreign tourists sits down. I think they are a business delegation or something similar. There's a couple of Brits, an Irish guy, a Norwegian woman, an Aussie and an American.

The round, baldy, yet somehow redheaded, Irish guy spends the game very knowledgeably and seriously explaining the rules of the game to everyone else. 

Except he is wrong on almost every point he makes! It's hilarious. The others all nod politely, still basically confused about why they have to pass the ball backwards in order to move forward.

And the crowd goes wild.

Every time Big Willie Mason, the meanest player for the Doggies and the villain of the piece, touches the ball, the crowd erupts in primal booing and hissing and catcalling.

Every time little Matty Bowen, one of the cousins I told you about earlier, touches the ball, the cheers and the whistles and the stamping of the crowd vibrates in the air around us.

When Big Willie Mason puts a vicious and illegal hit on Little Matty Bowen, venomous emotions rise up and hover like a black cloud over the arena. Matty gets slowly to his feet and stretches and jogs a little in place to show us he is recovered and the noise is palpable. My friend says, "Good old Matty, all he has to do is stand up and we love him twice as much all over again!"

I used to resist this type of experience. I didn't want to be part of the hoi polloi. I didn't want to be one those stamping hordes brought up or down in mood even for a moment by the passage of an oval shaped ball propelled around a smallish oblong by teams of bears of very little brain wearing different coloured clothes.

And sometimes I still don't like it much as a characteristic of human nature in general and me in particular; that we can get so engaged in a game and yet can't work up a puff of outrage against the things in life that could really use some of our passion - hunger, injustice, inequality and so on...

But, well, you know, it's the footy.

Anyway... WE WON! With three minutes to go, Little Matty Bowen stopped a try by tackling a bloke 6 inches taller than him about six inches from the line!

COW-BOYS! COW-BOYS! COW-BOYS!

And so we progress in the finals - I can almost taste our first premiership!

5 years later...

Still waiting. 


Check out my novel: The Anzac Girl

Is that a spaceship in your backyard, or did you just have one too many rumbos?

When I was young and foolish and drank A LOT, I went out one night with my brother and, well, drank A LOT. It was around Christmas;  back then, both he and I always went home to stay with my parents for a week. 

We got separated at one of the night spots and I went off home by myself, quite a few stations past pleasantly tipsy, but pulling up short of blind, legless maggotted. 

It all seemed so uneventful as I crept up the dark front stairs (read banged back and forward from one wall to the other), tiptoed across the lounge room (damn, why is it so hard to tiptoe in wooden platform shoes?) and genteely prepared myself for a well deserved slumber (ripped off my clothes, felt around in the dark for my jarmies, whisper-shouted, 'Fuck it' when I couldn't find them and dropped onto to the bed like a bag of wet cement). 

How lucky were my long retired parents, that I was such a considerate drunk?

I fell asleep. 

And then I woke up. It was still very dark so it couldn't have been too long since I got home. I looked out the bedroom window and was amazed to see, in the field just beyond the neighbour's backyard, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. 

No. Seriously. I'm telling you. It was fracking gorgeous; huge, round and glowing. I couldn't believe my eyes. I rose from my bed and went to the window for a better look. I sat on the window sill and looked at it, out there in the dark, its light reflected off my rapturous face. 

I decided to go out to investigate further and swivelled my legs up and over the window sill. I put one foot on the ground outside, still unable to take my eyes off that wondrous gizmo. I put my other other foot down on the ground and then... 

I began to fall. 

And then I really woke up. 

There was no goddamn ground. There was no field beyond the neighbour's yard. There was no magic glowing thingummyjig for me to go look at. My parents' house was a two story and I had been upstairs, but I was now rapidly approaching ground floor. I distinctly remember thinking as I fell, 'Oh, you stupid bitch.' 

I hit the ground in my mother's rock garden, bum first, legs tucked up as though I was bombing someone in a swimming pool and, well, of course, that was no fun. 

But how lucky am I? I wasn't broken in any drastic way that I could sense and anyhow, any physical discomfort I was feeling was soon replaced with the emotional pain of realising I couldn't get back into the house. Because of my drunken impatience, I had whisper-shouted Fuck it at my jarmies, which of course left me naked in my parents' side yard at around 2 am on Christmas Eve. 

I soon realised there was nothing for it but to run around to my parents front yard, up the front steps and pound on the front door until one of my parents answered it. I was obviously still very drunk because this was not nearly as distressing as it should have been. I actually felt pretty nonchalant about it. 

So, I did all that - but how lucky am I? When I got around the front, it was apparent my brother had come home after me and was even drunker than I, for he conveniently left the front door open. I ran inside, found my jarmies this time and fell fast asleep again. 

I woke up in the morning and the magic painkilling effects of the dark overlord, Fourex Heavy*, had worn off and well, I hurt. Everywhere. But mostly in my bum. 

I limped out to the kitchen where my mother stood at the stove, cooking breakfast, her lips pursed. I called it her cat's bum face, which wasn't very nice but she seemed to wear it every time I went out drinking. Also, instead of speaking in complete sentences, she grunted a lot. Such is the price you pay for drinking to excess under your parents' roof.

I went up and stood beside her. 'Guess what I did last night?' 

'Grunt.'

'I sleepwalked'

'Grunt.'

'Out my window.' 

'Grunt.' 

She stopped, spatula frozen in mid-scrambled-egg-stir, as what I'd said sunk in.'You what?!?'

We went to have a look out the window, silent as we stared down at the spot where Mum's beautiful flowers lay in a crushed and mangled heap, like some demented crop circle approximately the size of my bum. 

But how lucky was I? Less than a foot away from where I landed after falling out of a second story window, was a half metre tall metal stake marking off the corner of my mother's garden. 

How. Bloody. Lucky. Was. I. Shudder. 

Anyway, I tried to get by without seeing the doctor, but by late afternoon the pain in my lower back had become excruciating and I took myself off to the local hospital's emergency room. 

The doctor was a nice efficient young woman who didn't raise an eyebrow when I told her how I'd injured myself. I left out the part about seeing something beautiful that may or may not have been a flying saucer and just went with the old narcoleptic stroll out a very high window explanation. 

She had me x-rayed and sure enough I'd broken my tail-bone but there was nothing to be done for it but rest. She gave me pain-killers and saw me to the door. As I was walking out, she looked me right in the face, totally deadpan and said, 'So, what really happened?' 

It's worth noting here that I never ever slept in anything less than full dress again. 

* A potent strain of Australian bitter beer

Check out my novel: The Anzac Girl

Do you mind if someone tells you how a movie ends?

Yes, I mind. Sometimes I mind a lot.

There are different levels of minding, but generally, unless the person asks me specifically, 'Do you want to know what happens in the end?' and I say 'Yes, tell me, please', well, yeah, I mind. 

Level 1 Minding: Movies I'm not interested in. I don't want to see the movie anyhow and the spoiler is one of those sad people who can't help but tell you the entire film, beat for beat. 

Jeez, people, I didn't want to see it up on the big screen, professionally made - I certainly don't want to listen to it told in your drunken slurring, punctuated by um, ah, you betcha and ka-BOOM!

Level 2 Minding: Movies I am interested in. This happens when I'm with a group of others who have seen the film and are so enthusiastic, they blurt out major plot points or even the ending before I can put my hands over my ears and shout, 'Lalala!' I still hate this but I consider it a crime of passion - tragic, but occasionally unavoidable given the circumstances.

Level 3 Minding: I am with someone who is a compulsive movie spoiler, who knows I want to see the film and yet can't help but tell me what happens. It makes them feel like they know something I don't. I shun these ego maniacs anytime there's a big release coming that I want to see. 

Level 4 Minding: The person who quite simply gets a sadistic kick out of telling you the ending. They also blab the football score to people who have to work during the  Big Game, before they get a chance to watch a re-run. 


There is a Spoiler's Hell awaiting these Devil Spawn. In it, they are super-glued to a cramped vinyl seat in a perpetual rerun of Battlefield Earth. There's a lady with a crying baby that has crapped its nappy on one side, a man with B.O. and halitosis on the other, someone with no teeth and a bottomless bucket of popcorn behind and a woman with a Guiness Book of Records winning bouffant in front.

Check out my novel: The Anzac Girl

heath I swear...

My seventeen year old daughter went off to work as usual one morning several years ago. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang and she said, in a harsh voice that hung between astonishment and bewilderment, “Mum!” It was a tone you don’t want to hear from your teenager when you are not nearby. It was a tone that clearly said something was very wrong. I thought she’d had a car accident.

“What?” I said. “Honey, what is it?”

“Heath Ledger’s dead.”

I made her say it again. It didn’t register as believable. “What?”

“Heath Ledger’s dead.”

It’s funny how we need to hear these things at least twice before they begin to enter our consciousness as being possible. At the first telling, it might be a joke. When you make the teller repeat themselves, you assume they will grin stupidly and say, “Nah – just kidding.”

However, Heath Ledger’s death is not something my daughter would ever joke about. We’re on first name terms with him in this house - even though we never met him. We love him here – even though we know we never really knew anything about him.  She has a giant poster on her wall of those two beautiful boys, Heath and Jake Gyllenhaal, both in profile, looking away from each other, so convincing and heartbreaking in Brokeback Mountain, one of the greatest tales of love that can never be that was ever told.

I felt bad for my daughter after she called me, knowing she would have to scan groceries all day and put up with random rudeness from customers who neither knew nor cared that she was in grief. Furthermore, if they did know, they would more than likely ridicule her for it.

But I remember that I was about seventeen or eighteen years old when John Lennon died. I was working in a Queensland town where, just like the pub in the Blues Brothers, there were both types of music – country and western. I was driving along with a workmate and I had to pull over to the side of the road when I heard the news on the radio. I looked at my passenger, a born and bred local girl and waited for her face to mirror the disbelief on mine. But it didn’t. It showed only bemusement.

I said, “John Lennon’s dead?

She said, “Who?”

I mourned in private for John. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t a deep mourning or a prolonged grief process. I felt no need for counselling nor even many tears. But there was no one in that tiny western Queenslandtown who was terribly interested in the fact that John Lennon had died. I felt silly, seeing everyone else’s indifference, that it had touched my heart at all.

Since then, I have mourned quietly for several celebrities, some more deeply than others and for many different reasons.

Princess Di stands out; but not because I was any great fan.

I was the same age as her and still working in the same dry dusty town. I was serving beer in a public bar full of jack and jilleroos when she got married in that fairy tale dress and walked down that mile long aisle with the most eligible bachelor in the world. The TV was on above the bar and we all thought she looked rather gorgeous. Not that any of the girls there actually wanted to be her - imagine how hard it would be to get into that dress! Not that any of the blokes wanted to actually to be with her – imagine how hard it would be to get her out of that dress!

But we all agreed she looked bloody beautiful - like a doll or like an actress. Or like  a... a... oh my god! Like a PRINCESS!

She quite obviously didn’t live happily ever after, however. The marriage turned out to be one of the worst in the entire history of bad marriages and if Princess Di can't make it work with a grand start like that, what hope does someone like me have?

Then she went through all that other stuff; the affairs, the royal intrigues, the AIDS hugs, the land mine publicity - most of it happening on the cover of glossy magazines with her looking stunning and then ...

Splat! She dies. Just like any other commoner! Wow! We were astounded. We went splat right along with her for a short while.

We couldn’t believe it. That’s how the story ends? If Life had an awards night, Princess Di's would get the award for most unexpected final twist! If it were actually a screenplay, the script doctor would send that development back to the drawing board for an emergency rewrite.

"She can't die!" the script doctor would say. "The audience will never believe it!"

I mourned for Di not because I loved her - not like we, here in this house, loved Heath – but because life never seems to live up to its promise. The Princess Di story was paradise lost for me. The little girl, who somewhere deep down still believed that the prince would come along and carry her off to never ending safety, sniffled as she waved goodbye to the last of her illusions.

Then there was Steve Irwin. What can we say about Steve that hasn’t already been said? I had a chequered relationship with Steve over the years. It ranged from me being embarrassed by his gaudiness to admiring his audacity to being grateful for the many environmental stands he took.

Then quite suddenly, after Andrew Denton interviewed him on Enough Rope, I found myself actually liking him. Once I realised, after watching him talk for half an hour, that he really was just like that, that it wasn’t an act, I no longer found him embarrassing but rather, funny and sincere.

I was so sad about Steve Irwin’s death. I’d never watched one of his nature shows in its entirety and I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to shake his hand if I saw him in the street. But I recognised the passage of a human being who had truly lived, with passion and belief and joy and love, one who wore his heart on his sleeve, one who put his money where his mouth was.

But as sad as I was about his death, I was also more than a little creeped out. It seemed so gothic that such a patently big hearted man should be stabbed through that big heart by a creature that all agreed was among the most placid in the sea. It seemed so mythic; as though Poseidon had smited him for daring to roam freely and fearlessly through his domain.

I think it is this epic quality that accounts for the way we can sometimes get caught up in the drama of the death of someone we don’t know. These are archetypal stories played out by heroic personalities. Diana is the princess who was supposed to live happily ever after; Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. Steve Irwin is the jungle man who understands the wild world so well that he can never be taken by it; Tarzan, Mowgli. It is when the story ends contrary to the template we hold in our subconscious memory that we are so shocked.

So, what timeless story was Heath Ledger’s life supposed to play out for us? What archetypal character did he represent? He’d had many love interests according to gossip magazines but he just couldn’t settle down. He appeared to be a man who loved deeply but simply couldn’t bear to be around people full time. He was the taciturn cowboy, the solitary range rider who disappeared into the sunset every evening alone. According to legend, Heath Ledger was not supposed to die at all, and certainly not in his bed. He was supposed to live according to his own rules and to fade away with his boots on, many many years from now, a wily wiry old loner, in some dusty place we comfort-loving city folk have never even heard of before.

I confess that I cried when I put the phone down after my daughter told me this news and despite my search for the reasons behind it, I’m still not entirely sure why. How do these people we don’t know find their way into our hearts? And who is to judge as false or misplaced, the emotion we feel on hearing of their loss?

In my house, we loved it every time he visited. We adored having him with us, right here, in our lounge room. We loved him even more when we saw him on the silver screen, his face godlike in close up, as large and magnetic as a rising harvest moon in a country sky. I loved him as Ned Kelly, righteous and fiery, the widow’s son outlawed. And I loved him as Casanova, relaxed and funny, the world’s greatest romance hero. But I loved him best of all as Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. I’ve wept each of the three times I’ve watched him take his dead lover’s shirt out of the closet and say through the closed mouth of a man who is not at home with his emotions, “Jack, I swear…”

And I couldn’t be more certain that I will weep again the next time I watch it.



Check out my novel: The Anzac Girl

my short career as a cartoonist...

Check out my novel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Anzac-Girl-ebook/dp/B004VS7I8E

once in a lifetime...

I was just wandering around YouTube and found this old Talking Heads song. Has there ever been anyone like them? Pink Floyd could have written Shine On You Crazy Diamond for them.

You may ask yourself, what is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?
You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?
You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?

It brought back memories for me of being in Darwin visiting my brother Gary in about 1986. He was in the air force and it was Friday night at the RAAF boozer. There was music. There was tequila. There was dancing. 

There was my brother doing an amazing impersonation of David Byrne's mad dance in this film clip as Once in a Lifetime played. 

It's the kind of song that means more the older you get. Looking back at the memory of my brother and I, beautiful people in our early twenties, dancing without restraint, with no idea that one day we would indeed, as does everybody, say to ourselves with horror My God! What have I done?, it all feels sharply poignant to me.

Check out my novel The ANZAC Girl

the original flash mob - Germany 1935...

Cabaret is one of my Top 5 films and this scene is one of the most powerful from it. It's about the terrifying way that the Nazi Party used Germany's youth to advance their cause.

Very creepy!

Check out my novel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Anzac-Girl-ebook/dp/B004VS7I8E

the download Santa...

My daughter is so funny. I wanted her copy of Game of Thrones to watch. This text conversation ensued:

Why are films like wild animals?

John Lasseter of Pixar:


"We don't actually finish our films, we release them."

why is everyone always hatin' on the clowns?

First they came for the clowns... But I didn't say anything, because I wasn't a clown.

Look, I feel sorry for the lady in the clip below. I really do! 


But I actually feel sorrier for the clown; look at the poor guy trying to be funny while the woman with the clown phobia screams and cries and basically behaves like he has come to kill and then dismember her. If not the other way around. 


Poor old clowns. They are being persecuted everywhere we look. And it's not a new phenomenon.

Stephen King took us to new heights of clown bigotry in It. Michael Richards from Seinfeld fanned the flames of clown hatred for years, but did anybody care?  John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer first and a clown second, you know.

As Shakespeare said so movingly about the deep down humanity of us all: "If you prick us, do we not bleed tomato sauce? If you tickle us, do we not laugh - then jump in a tiny car and try to run you over? If you poison us, do we not die - for half an hour, gagging and clutching our chests and pretending to hang ourselves with our own ties?"

Next time you are tempted to revile a clown, remember what the Bible has to say about it. 

Clownliness is next to godliness.

my latest act of creative genius

It's possible I have too much time on my hands...

The Porn Identity...

You have to laugh.

About five years ago, I drove into my driveway after doing some shopping and noted happily that one of the offspring had taken in the supposedly empty garbage bin without me having to ask.

Whoopee!

So. I get inside and my then eighteen year old daughter comes rushing right up to me. This is not normal. Although we've always had a relatively cordial relationship, the rushing to the door to meet Mummy the minute she walks in phase of life finished some years ago.

So Daughter, looking kind of crazy in the eyes, says, 'Mum! Someone put a bag in our bin.'

'They what?' I say. 'For that matter, WHO what?'

She says, 'They put a BAG in our BIN!'

'Hmm...' I wasn't sure why this was such an emergency. 'Yeah? And so?'

Someone put their garbage in our bin. Not that I want someone else's stinky garbage in my bin, of course, but I'm not going to the coppers about it or anything.

But Daughter's all agitated. 'No. No, not a garbage bag. A BAG bag! Come and look at it.'

I made her wait while I put the cold groceries in the fridge just because it was fun to watch my normally cool calm and collected grown-up jig around like a five year old who needs to pee.

Finally, I put her out of her misery and let her drag me out to where we keep the bin by the back door. I go lift the lid and peek into the newly emptied bin. Sure enough, there is a very big, very nice canvas bag in there obviously very full of something.

Something that someone didn't want but that they didn't want to throw away in their own bin. Something they needed to be rid of so bad they didn't mind losing a very nice canvas bag over it.

I look at my daughter and say, 'So what happened? Did you see who put it in there?'

She says no, she just went to bring in the bin and felt it was still heavy so she had a look and there it was - the bag - the mysterious sinister bag.

I looked back down at the bag and I felt a bit sick. If I'd been married, f#@% feminism; opening that bag would have been a job for my husband. I know. I know. I've watched too much NYPD Blue but I honestly thought, Oh God, I hope there's not a head in there. and then, even worse, Oh, God, I hope there's not a dead baby in there.

Daughter says, 'It's something really gross, isn't it, Mum? Oh, God, I hope there's not a dead puppy in there.'

'Don't be so ridiculous,' I say. 'Of course there's not a dead puppy in there.'

We stood there, looking apprehensively into our garbage bin until it became clear that, yes, there was definitely an unidentified canvass bag in there and, no, no knight in shining armour was going to come riding up, thrust us to safety behind him and deal heroically with the pesky damn thing for us.

So finally, I reach into the bin towards it, as if it's going reach right back at me and grab my arm. When I hold the zip fastener between my fingers, I breathe out heavily as if I have just cut the right wire while defusing a bomb on a TV cop show. I unzip it a little, wincing, certain I am going to see a dead eye staring back out at me through the hole.

Zip. Hmmm... Plastic. Ziip. A little further. Ziiip. Looks like DVDs.

Daughter, who is looking over my shoulder, goes, 'Oh fantastic! Movies! Look - Liar Liar!' The colours were basically the same as Liar Liar and she LOVES Jim Carrey.

Yay! It wasn't dead puppies or abandoned babies or decapitated mob boss heads! It was just movies! Neither of us stopped to ask ourselves why someone would throw Liar Liar away in someone else's bin in the dead of night. I know there are a lot of people out there who don't like Jim Carrey - but that seems extreme...

I zipped a little further and looked a little closer and, well, it wasn't Liar Liar at all. More like Stripper Stripper. Dicks and mouths and tits all over the shop.

Someone abandoned a great big bag of porn DVDs in my garbage bin! My daughter and I hung over that bin, laughing our guts out. It wasn't a dead baby. It wasn't a severed head. It wasn't dead puppies. It wasn't even Liar Liar. It was just a bunch of dirty old porn.

I told one friend and he thought I should go to the police. I thought that was a little extreme but he said, 'You know, there's a reason they're not putting that out in their own garbage bin. There could be anything on those DVDs.' Ew. Thanks for that one, bud.

I called another friend and she said, 'You should put it on ebay.' I must admit that was the first thought that crossed my mind as well. I don't know what that says about me.

When we'd had a good laugh and gone through all the things that it could be - a schoolkid who nearly got caught, a husband whose wife decided to clean out his shed for him - my friend said to me, 'Of course, the biggest question, Christine, is... Why do these bizarre things always happen to you? Out of all the bins in the entire city, whoever it was was ALWAYS going to abandon their bag of unwanted porn in your bin.'

I was going to bring the bag inside my house till I decided what to do with it, but what if it was just a temporary measure for some crazy pervert and he came back that night to get his Bin Porn back and found it gone?

I couldn't risk a crazy pervert banging on my door in the middle of the night shouting at the top of his lungs that he wanted his porn back! I left the bag right where it was and then in the morning when we checked, the bin was pleasingly empty, just as it should have been when Daughter brought it in from the street the day before.

Ah, all was right in our white bread, suburban world again!

So after all these years, what made me think about the case of Mysterious Bin Porn?

Daughter has grown up. She has made that necessary pilgrimage away to live in the big city and now returned to her home town - older, wiser, deeper in debt, more open about the shenanigans of her teenage years.

I mentioned the Bag in the Bin episode and we both had a new big laugh about it all.

'That was so funny,' she more or less says, 'this happened, that happened, blah blah blah...' She's a natural comedian and I laughed along at her recollection of the incident. '...and then my friends came and got it out of the bin in the middle of the night.'

Whaaa? I looked at her. 'Your who-sie what out of the wherefore in the when?'

'Oh. Didn't I tell you that part?'

'No! You didn't tell me that your friends were a bunch of perverted bin porn thieves!'

The story emerged: So hilarious did she think the story was at the time that of course she was immediately on her phone texting all her friends about our sinful bin full of porn.

Word got around and a few days later she learned that several of her male buddies had formed a deviant swat team, infiltrated our yard after all the lights were out and claimed the canvass bag full of dirty goodness as the spoils of war.

Never doubt the desperate hunger of the teenage male sexual appetite.

Dangerous Liaisons

I watched one of my top ten favourite films last night. Dangerous Liaisons. John Malkovich is the best villain on earth and Michelle Pfeiffer the most open-hearted beauty the world has ever known. 


My daughter, Gillian, said, during one of the glorious scenes where John and Michelle stroll down a path through a beautiful French garden, he, in his wig and hose, she, in her enormous panniers, 'She obviously never asked anyone for an honest opinion on whether her bum looked big in that or not.'

On storytelling and why the community funds the arts

I was debriefing my computer when I came across this. I was asked to give a talk to a community group a few years back on the value of art in society. This is what I said. I still believe it.


“ I must say I was a little surprised when I was asked to speak to you. I’m a writer. This means that primarily, I’m a storyteller and while I certainly have fixed and strong ideas about how story telling fits into society and helps to build community, I know that most people today don’t. Today, storytelling has been reduced, for the main part, to entertainment and news.


It wasn’t always so. Tribal cultures throughout history have had a tradition of passing vital information down from generation to generation by storytelling around the cooking fires at night. Australia’s indigenous culture, the Aborigines have an incredibly rich tradition of story telling, some of which has crossed cultural boundaries and entered into general understanding. We all know for example that Aboriginal culture talks about a beautiful concept of eternity called the Dreaming, another world which exists invisibly but eternally alongside this one. We have all heard of the Rainbow Snake and many of us are spooked by the curlews call at night because of stories we've heard from Indigenous neighbours.


These stories traditionally have three main purposes:
1) to educate.
2) to ventilate
3) to entertain.


The educational aspect is clear. The kids of the tribe learn not to go outside the fire’s circle of safety because they are frightened by the stories that are told there. Apart from being scary, these stories are often also deeply moral – the characters are almost always given some sort of natural justice. Heroes are rewarded and villains are punished. The Bible and other holy books are the best example of this, although most of the fairy tales that have been handed down to us serve the same purpose – to teach us how to live safely and productively in society. Don’t trust the wolf, Red Riding Hood. Work hard, Cinderella, and you’ll get the prize.


These stories were a way of shaping the next generation into good citizens…


...which makes me very afraid for today’s society sometimes! Where are our stories?
At the movies, of course. And on the television. And in the video game boxes. The stories told today serve the same purpose as stories have ever served – to educate the next generation about how to behave as a citizen of our society.


Have you seen some of the films they are watching before they're old enough to make informed decisions on right and wrong?


Mind you, with further thought, I have to admit that most of the kid’s stories on our screens today do have a strong moral base. The vast majority of films show that he who follows his conscience prospers while the villain gets his comeuppance. I may not always agree with the language they use but the stories they tell are most often sound. Personally, the thing I find most offensive, language wise, about what screen culture teaches our kids is the accent! Australian kids have been so drenched by American TV, film and popular music that they don’t even notice they speak with a U.S. accent!*


The second purpose of story was to ventilate. Story has always provided a safe way for individuals and the greater community to express strong emotions. Our greatest fears result in our best most popular stories. From Little Red Riding Hood to Psycho through to Silence of the Lambs, we have an enduring fear of the psychotic potential of strangers. Same with our greatest hopes. Look at the never ending popularity of a great love story - from Cinderella to Gone with the Wind through to Forrest Gump. The reality of life is that the majority of us will never have to endure the things that terrify us most and most of us will never have a love story quite as dramatic as Scarlett and Rhett. But these stories tell us what it’s like for those who do go through such extreme experiences and give us clues as to what to expect if these things should ever happen to us.


As I said earlier, the third purpose of storytelling is sheer entertainment and escape. It doesn’t matter how worthy the first two purposes are; if you don’t have the third, if your story is not entertainingly told, nobody is going to read, listen or watch it in order to get the message it contains.


Even in the best of times, life can be pretty dull, colourless and boring. Now try for a moment to really imagine what it would be like without stories. That is – no magazines. No novels. No TV. No DVDs. No jokes even.


Now try to really imagine what life would be like without any form of art at all. No paintings on any walls anywhere. No music. No songs. No dancing. No fountains or statues in the parks. It’s pretty grey, isn’t it?


Yes, we can live without art – but would we really want to?


The idea of the starving artist is as real today as it ever was. Most artists cannot make a living from their art. And yet we can’t imagine a life without their product. It’s something to think about next time you hear someone worrying about the arts being subsidised by government.


Everybody wants to be constantly surrounded by art. But nobody wants to pay the artist a living wage for the work that makes everyday life worth living!


So, how does the art of storytelling fit into everyday community life?


We are all storytellers. Take the three things I’ve already mentioned – education, ventilation and entertainment. It’s all in a day’s work for all of us!


For instance, when you get sick of nagging your child to put the garbage out, chances are you get creative and tell her a story about how some little kid whose house gets overrun with rubbish contracts some terrible disease which causes her limbs to fall off.


When your husband (pardon my sexism) continues to drop socks wherever he takes them off after 20 years of reasoned argument, you would probably feel justified in telling him that story about the woman who Just Gets Fed Up With It one day and her man comes home one day to find an empty house. Some might call it black mail… But it’s actually education: “If you do such and such, then so and so will happen as a consequence.”


Then there’s ventilation. The boss gives you a hard time. You get to the pub and you tell anyone who’ll listen the story of what he’s done to you and what a mongrel he is.
Teenagers spend most of their time phone, text or IMing each other stories of what’s happening to them at the moment and what they hope or fear will happen next.
And as for entertainment… You just have to think of the last time you said to someone, “You’ll never guess what happened to me today?” and had them breathless as you gave them the next exciting episode in your life.


Or the next exciting episode in someone else’s life…


That's called gossip.


Everything has both a positive and a negative side. The negative side of story telling is alive and well – as I’m sure it has been down through the ages. Today, they have entire magazines devoted to telling us things about other people that we have no right to know. It’s common knowledge that many of these stories are made up – and yet still these magazines flourish.


Personally, I believe it’s a perversion of the age old art of storytelling and I hope to see a swing back to people minding their own business and taking an interest in the stories that are all around them in their personal world. Our world here at the moment is made up of you, the people in this room.


There are as many important stories in this room as there are people. Some of those stories we can learn from, some can inspire us to do better in our own lives, some might just give us a good laugh or a good cry. Whatever! Every single one of them is more important to our lives than who Posh Spice’s husband is diddling in the broom closet. Besides which – that’s none of our business!


I encourage all of you to go home and write down your favourite story from your own life. You don’t have to write a whole book – just your favourite. Put it somewhere safe, preferably in plastic to preserve it as best you can. I guarantee someday it will mean something to someone.”



* To any of my American friends who read this - Hey! I LOVE your accent - just not coming out of the mouths of our babes.