In praise of young men

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"The transfixed", Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Darwin, George Raper, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Nicholson, wombats

Usually I collect stories of ninety year olds who run marathons, sail down the Ganges with their sketch books, finally and reluctantly give up cycling, graduate with a doctorate or even take up line dancing.

But suddenly I’ve found myself with a collection of the stories of young men who’ve done things that catch the imagination.

The unlikely standard bearer for this troop is Peter Nicholson. As a lad of 16, while he was at school at Timbertop, the exclusive wilderness school in Victoria, he spent his nights down wombat burrows, learning about their habits to such an extent that he is still cited in wombat research today. I first read about him years ago in Australian wildlife, one of those buy-a-magazine-a-month-and-build-them-up-into-an-encyclopedia deals. Unlike most things I read, it lodged in an easy-recall part of my brain, so I’ve been collecting information about him on and off ever since.

What impressed me is the daring of his enterprise; the focus and thoroughness of his explorations; his youth; and the covert blessing the school gave to his night-time absences.

Charles Darwin is famous for many things. However, as I read The voyage of the Beagle recently, it was his youth that I was in awe of, and not only his youth but the vastness of his knowledge. He was interested in geology, botany, biology and had already at the age of 22 read voraciously and entered into correspondence with experts in each of these fields. Then he embarked on a five-year journey around the world, exploring on land whenever the opportunity arose and speculating with boundless curiosity about everything he saw.

Rimbaud was a grubby youth, morally and physically, prowling the underbelly of France from the time he was 13. Although he gave up writing poetry at 20, he is remembered as a great poet. None of my preconceptions about him prepared me for the empathy in The transfixed, which certainly doesn’t read  like the work of an adolescent wild one. Black in the snow and fog, at the great lighted air-shaft, their bums / rounded, on their knees, five little ones – what anguish! – watch the baker making heavy white bread.

An idle conversation in my local book-shop introduced me to Patrick Leigh Fermor. When he was 17, he decided to walk from Holland to Constantinople instead of completing school and set out in winter in 1933. As he travelled across Central Europe in the days before the war, he slept rough on many occasions, but he also overnighted with aristocrats, farmers and monks, finding surprisingly few hints of things to come. When he died recently he was in his nineties and still working on the final volume of his young man’s travels.

George Raper is the latest in my pantheon. He sailed at 17 with the First Fleet. By then he’d already been at sea for 3 years. When he arrived in the fledgling settlement, he sat with his watercolours and painted the flowers and birds around Sydney Cove with the tablet paints from his new paintbox. Many of his paintings have only just surfaced and the colours are still splendidly vivid. Before he was 20 he had watched the Sirius go down near Norfolk Island and by the time he was 27 he was dead.

These are five young men I admire: the close observer of the natural world, the explorer / polymath, the poet, the traveller and the artist. These are lives I could have wanted for myself. In fact, these are the lives I live, albeit in relatively puny, pallid versions, now.

Transcript of Australian Story about the Wombat Boy

Complete text of “The transfixed”

Obituary for Patrick Leigh Fermor

George Raper on the ABC: download audio or read transcript

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Portals to the past 2

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exploring the south coast, grandchildren, old letters, work

This morning I discovered another way to take myself back to the past. Tidying up piles of papers in the study, I came across a number of letters and cards in my own handwriting. I was puzzled until I realised they were bundles of my letters given back to me by friends tidying up piles of papers in their studies.

Of course the urge to sit down and read them was irresistable, as is the urge to salvage whatever scraps I can: random morsels of my life between 1991 and 2002, as I wrote it then.

Mungo: I wrapped the lunette and the starry sky around me, and my back has not so much as twinged since.

Regrets: Just as I move out of inertia and start developing projects (sitting on the beach under a full moon; painting furniture; writing every day) holidays are over.

The National Gallery: Freda Kahlo, Australian women artists – and two paintings by Bodalla kids in the Children’s Gallery: a Potato Point wave hanging in the NGA!

School:  The withdrawal room is aimed at drawing the claws of recalcitrant students. They don’t seem to be recalcitrant today – we’re all waiting for the bell … Women’s studies got no takers and I’ve been dragooned into supervising Beauty and You. Maybe I’ll get a chance to subvert, maybe I’ll be subverted.

Along the Darling: I’m writing this in my camp chair along the Darling. The river ripples and reflects below me; the occasional fish plops and the occasional galah balances on a log for a drink. I woke in the middle of the night last night, drowning in stars: they were scooped up by the river as well as in the sky. 

Lunching at work: I’ve found water gardens in Batemans Bay. I ate my lunch the other day above eels, and two large and cranky black swans with five cygnets. (My memory kicks in here: I failed to mention macca boxes, drink cans and plastic bags!)

Grandchildren: We’re grandparents. We drove the backroads to Queensland and found the pot of gold at the end of the journey. T. with open eyes, after a lot of toe tickling and a dowse in the bath. She didn’t want to wake up because she’d been partying all morning … We now have a grandson: I had the ineffable delight of spending a whole idle rainy day being his bed, and finally becoming an effective burper.

What my daughters are doing: R’s off to Jordan to study, with a swag of cash earnt by her brain power, riding through the Sudan and Ethiopia en route … F returns from her cycling trip, Macedonia to Lithuania  … I was mother-of-the bride in absentia. F was married in Canada in hail and snow by an exotic black guy called Cecil T. Trotman. Her wedding gear cost $5 … R’s in China on a pushbike, having ridden alone through Laos… R’s back from Sardinia with a passion for rock climbing … R’s affianced to a Polish architect … F is back home from an epic pushbike journey through Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi … After 20000 km of safe cycling all over the world, R.  came off on the Potato Point road and broke her collar-bone. 

Solitude on Saturday night: I’m writing a letter in front of a blazing fire after a batch of marking. I ate leftovers for the third night in a row and I’m listening for the fifteenth time to a tape of Ella Fitzgerald and Elton John. The marking rewarded me with an assignment by a student who actually had fun doing it. He turned King Lear into a space epic, and Hagar the horrible into Shakespearean verse.

Flying to Orange. We flew in a 6-seater, me beside the pilot because everyone else wanted to cower in fear in the (very small) body of the plane. We flew into a sunrise that threw perspective into chaos. What looked like red coals turned out to be the sun rising above a bank of black cloud. On the return journey we had to wait for a hailstorm to dissipate before we surfed the clouds into sunset.

Going photographically digital: I’ve just burnt my first chaotic CD to send to my son, whose fingers still itch for the paper rectangle … I’m speaking at State Conference next week and my powerpoint uses my photos as background. 

Driving to work: I may travel long distances but there are pleasures. A rainbow, vibrant against a grey sky for nearly 100 kilometres. The tesselated bark on the huge trees on the outskirts of Eden. Frost shadows in the paddocks.

An impulsive trip to Tasmania: A solitary walk around Dove Lake, the pinnacles of Cradle Mountain emerging capriciously from dense cloud. A freezing high country walk around a deserted tarn. A night camping under the swathe of a lighthouse beam. An afternoon at Port Arthur. Waterfalls, rushing rivers and very tall trees.

Preparing for Syria and Jordan: My rabies injections are in the doctor’s frig, the cholera medication in my own. I think my greatest need is immunisation against trepidation!

Three months in Sydney: I slept in my own bed every working night. Sometimes I worked from 7.30 am to a bleary-eyed and dysfunctional 9.30 pm. I went to the gym most mornings and indulged in facials, massages at the Korean bath house, ferry rides, movie-snoozing and hair tinting. I lived in one room at my uncle’s house and cooked on a one ring primus – a nice mix of camping and the yuppy life.

Exploring the coast: Suddenly, after 25 years here, we’re starting to explore We whizzed off at 7 for a quick trip to Narooma to check out a couple of rainforest patches, and arrived home about 4, having driven through Wadbilliga NP (trout streams, great rocky mountainsides and not another car) to the heathland and wombat holes of the escarpmet, and then down past the Tuross cascades to Nerrigundah (more great rocky mountainsides.) … the coast Bermagui to Bega gave us round-rocked beaches, groves of huge old banksias, whales and lakes … around Eden a campsite with a champagne-cooling creek and a forest of tree ferns.

This is not a bad haul of memories, and justifies both the written word and the giving back of letters, although the chronology is all over the place because I committed the capital crime of not dating letters. I had a pleasant morning, encountering the variety and change that a decade brought – much easier than trawling through my grey matter, or for that matter, ten years of diaries.

What the sea brings in: Sea weed

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Potato Point, seaweed

You’re never quite sure what you’ll find when you amble along the beach at low tide. Last weekend, the northern end of Potato Point beach was deep in sea-weeds. So deep that sand had built up and the weed contained pools, drawing blue from the autumn sky. The seaweed floated, as it would under the ocean, and the watery gleam that is such a devil to photograph disappeared in the aquaeous light. For this luxuriance you would usually need a snorkel and underwater daring. All I needed was one eye watching where I put my foot, and the extra eye of the camera.

The seaweed entered my mind and wouldn’t leave. I lay in bed, between awake and asleep, trying to compose a description without using the letter “e”. Such bizarre disciplines only happen liminally.

Piling thick, from way down and far out, a wild uprooting. Mahogany, khaki, rust, tan;  dull mint, pistachio, amaranth, asparagus;  apricot, pumpkin, coral pink, burgundy, fading gold, glinting gold. Frondy, tubular, strappy; twists, coils, curls. Voluptuous in sand pools, floating, wafting, drifting.