Writing by a golden light in the witching hour
protected by a curtain of darkness, a curtain of sound, the wind in the trees, the sea pummelling nearby cliffs, the talking dark of cricket and frogs...
My little sliver of a sanctuary, a place of soft ligth, a sudden rustle in an edgy dark, a growl from a tree, there is something out there...
This world of grand scale, melodramatic skies and spareness, this seductive landscape gives me an endless inspiration...
Within it I feel more like myself, the person I once wanted to be, perhaps a freer, lighter, childhood self...
It's about paying attention to detail with an outsider's eye yet a heart deeply rooted in this place...
I have always been hungrily seeking the new, yet now, bizarrely, all change. I am content. With this, just this.
A next door farmer stops by next morning for his usual cup of tea, his footsteps lost in the great raucous cram of birdsong, the shrills and thrills and shrieks...
his footsteps lost in the great raucous cram of birdsong, the shrills and thrills and shrieks...
Just like me, he gravitates to this space to meander with thought and work and to sleep.
A place of soft days, where the morning quietly clear its throat with the whipbird's duet and kookaborra's glee...
I invited him to this little backyard of mine to share his stories of the outback....the life beyond the dirt, flies and sweat...
He was just a 16-year-old when he left the city behind to work on sheep and cattle stations up north of endless wastness of Western Australia.
The work he did in freezing cold or oppressive heat was repetitive and arduous, to cut chaff and to pickle wheat, build or repair fences, spray tanks and wind mills...
But his forte was riding around mustering, riding top quality horses was his reason for wanting a station life. His beloved sheepdog, the bond was indissoluble, fifty years later he still misses him...
One scalding day, he fought a grass fire on a 40-metre front with just a few wet hessiac sacks, enduring livid sunburn and blistered and calloused hands,
interminable warms of mozzies and blowflies, a dense black assembly competed for space on the sweat patch on his back...
Mustering expeditions could last weeks and teh men camped in the open. Hygiene was poor and the food basic occasionally just bungarra (lizard) and bardies (white grubs).
The company was rough, some bosses tyrannical, some fellow workers lazy, thuggish and vulgar, shooting, gambling and drinking grog whole night.
He was the youngest among them, the older men toughened hom up and taught him practical skills, but that was about it.
But the country crept inside him and took root. Can mere red dirt and stones and scrubby trees and shrubs...
rises and falls in the land and haze and a vast blue sky be so potent?
The sheer scale of it is awesome, so too the enveloping silence. He finished his monologue handing me back his empty cup.
After he left I walked, just like every other morning, to the beach, where Indian Ocean gently greeted me...the landscape of a vast seduction finally seduced me...
New morning, new day and my last journey, the most beautiful and strange of them all, because it is about finding yourself and finding home...
There is nowhere
to get my characters from
but inside myself
somewhere,
it never occured to me
to ask myself,
can I do this or not,
I had the feel
of it,
for it
and unsatisfied thirst
to write down what I think.
Since my teenage years
I devoured novels
three a week.
Diving into the heroic waters
of history
and science fiction,
I wanted to live anywhere
but now.
Every night
before I closed my eyes
dreaming about those
long forgotten
and futuristic times.
Making voiceless conversations
with favourite authors
answering their questions
and ambiguities
trying to resolve everything.
I knew they trusted me
to bring my own imagination,
my own personality
to the story
and meet them halfway...
Life is simple,
I said to myself,
pursue your goals,
if you don't have a goal,
you don't have a life,
I felt I had already lived
a thousand lives
every night
with every new story finished.
My goal was to write
just like those authors
of my childhood did.
There was no other way
just keep practising
and practising,
interpreting,
selecting,
arranging facts,
at every page
make a half a dozen decisions
as to how to put over
a certain fact to the reader,
all the time weighing evidence,
not just for its usefulness
but for its provenance.
Use your brain,
but write with your heart,
I said to myself,
create your inner life,
mimic the natural flow
of memories,
senses
and impressions,
choose an exciting place
hide yourself behind
mysterious heroine's eyes
looking out...
make your readers
a proposal,
an offer,
they could not resist to take.
There is a terrific sense of responsibility
to be accurate
in facts and in language.
And then there is the dream-like stuff,
that is beyond everyone's remit,
everyone,
except the writer.
Writers feed on change,
as languages have always evolved,
and societies,
knowledge has increased,
new ideas and inventions emerged.
The rate of change has never been higher
than it is now.
New terms for
new items,
speech and writing fashions
which seemingly are based
on making a virtue of carelessness.
Writing in a different languages
require endless practice
to avoid damage to its precision
and effectiveness.
Reaching my adulthood
my writing was pushed aside
replaced by other goals of my life,
studying to be an artist,
working as a teacher,
three times mother
emigrating to new countries,
learning new languages
and starting all over
again
another place,
another home,
another time.
Travelling around the world
had given me a global perspective
on human nature,
once you put aside
the social and cultural differences,
people are just people,
above everything else,
they want to be happy,
healthy,
enjoying their everyday life
with their family and friends...
Reaching maturity
I suddenly realized,
life is demanding
to take charge
of my own circumstances
to turn my problems
into missed opportunities.
All of the resources
I needed
to succeed
were inside me,
the only stopping block
was my own fear,
and then,
a terminal illness crossed my path
providing me a chance
to get rid of my negative energy,
fear, anger, sadness and guilt
suddenly had no place in my vocabulary.
Life suddenly screamed at me
with its intensity
how precious a moment can be.
I stopped rushing around,
I settled down
and start to write
again,
and yet,
becoming a writer
was not
any more
an important goal for me.
Uncertainty about tomorrow
was more frightening
than the death
sitting there alive
conscious
I jotted down
a constant battle
I was fighting
in my head.
Reflective writing
for the clarity,
in the shadow of death
life has a new intensity
and vivacity.
Crises often bring out
the best in people,
we are forced to
to reach deep down
and grab the resources
we didn't need before.
We, in general,
deal with out death
as we deal with life.
There are people
who take everything in their stride,
apparently fearless
and those
others,
incredibly frightened
to be challenged.
This is the toughtest time in their life,
but for some,
the transendence comes,
they can live in the moment
in away
they have not managed to before.
We watch thousands of fictional deaths
on the screen
every day,
yet,
listening to a real person
speaking of their vulnerability
is intimate
and touches that part of us
that knows
that terminal illness is all around us.
When people approach
their own impending demise,
they usually become introspective
and are struck by the triviliaty
and superficiality of the things
we all do
on a daily basis.
There is nowhere
to get my characters from
but inside myself
somewhere,
it never occured to me
to ask myself,
can I do this or not,
I had the feel
of it,
for it
and unsatisfied thirst
to write down what I think.
What motivates me to love?
The belief that it is up to me
to get rid of negative emotions,
negative beliefs
and all those limitations
that prevented me
before
experiencing the joy,
happiness
and bliss
that truly is
at the core of my being...
What motivates me to live?
The belief in my ability
to create my own future
do not let it to be
pre-determinded by circumstances,
by the limited world I live in.
What motivates me to write?
The will to stay alive.
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