Seffy and the First Fleet

In late 2012, Tony and I decided, after a couple of years of talking about it, the time had come to leave TI.  We wanted Kibbim and Seffy to understand there was a big world beyond our tiny island.  What better time to relocate children than the beginning of the year.  I booked flights for the kids and I on Australia Day, 2013.

     I wasn’t ready to leave and panicked. The big world beyond our tiny island frightened me. The day before we were due to leave I cancelled our flights.

     I re-enrolled the kids into school and settled back into the easy pace of life on TI. 

     A few months after my aborted departure, the kids were doing their homework one afternoon while I made dinner.

     ‘We learnt the First Fleet today,’ said Kibby, excited.  ‘They were sailing ships from England.’

     ‘When did they arrive?’

     ‘Australia Day, 1788.’  He paused and had a think.  ‘They took over Australia for England. Something like that anyway.’

     ‘Cool,’ I said.  ‘Where did they land when they arrived in Australia?’ 

     ‘Um.  They landed somewhere. Um.’

     ‘Starts with B … buh, buh,’ I said.  Poor Kibby was wracking his brain. ‘Come on, buh, buh-‘

     Seffy looked up from her homework, suddenly attentive.

     ‘Bamaga,’ she said like a true local, Bum-ug-uh.

     It really was time to leave TI. 

A pelfie and Lindsay's Prozac pickle

What is correct term for a self-shot of five?  A pentie?  A pelfie?  Wrong.  It’s termed an amazing achievement.  

It's amazing Tony finally worked out how to take a pelfie!

     It’s called an amazing achievement because it almost didn’t happen.  Hours earlier I was bursting with the worst maternal rage and tempted to wring Kibbim’s neck.  But I didn't want to end up in the watch house or on the ABC website with the headline, Mother strangles son over school shoe demand.

     The day began with Kibbim demanding I take him to Big W to buy him school shoes.  He has none and school starts on Tuesday morning.  All he had to do was read for half an hour, which he did and then write a recount of his very exciting day yesterday helping his father and grandfather on the farm.  It should have taken ten minutes.  He sat beside me in the office and said he wasn’t writing ‘nothing’.  I reminded him if he wanted school shoes he needed to write the recount and I let the grammar slip go.

     He broke the lead pencil trying to cover the page in graphite.  He stood up and slammed the chair against the desk as he stormed off for the first time. He came back with a new pencil and wrote four illegible lines.  He stormed off.  I called him back lovingly and jotted out a plan to help him.  

     ‘There,’ he said, eyebrows raised, taunting me to flog him.  He had written six lines comprising one sentence with eight thens. One hour and twenty minutes had passed.

     I fantasised about being a mother in the early twentieth century.  I would have grabbed my feather duster and paddled his behind.  I wondered if feather dusters even existed anymore.  At that moment I was prepared to settle the matter with my bare hands.  I remembered what watch houses are like and thought about the ABC headline.  I needed a diversion.

     ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I yelled out.  ‘A family walk.’  Everyone whooped with joy.  I think they (and probably the neighbours) were sick of the stalemate between Kibbim and me.

     We agreed on the circuit around and up and down Mt Baldy.  I packed the food and water for the hour and a half round trip and we were off.  I checked my watch.  Eleven forty.  Not the best time to start a walk in FNQ on a sunny January day, even if it is five degrees Celsius cooler than Cairns.  I hoped the heat would wear Kibby out and he’d forget about school shoes.

     Apart from Seffy complaining about the sun, the heat, the grass, Kibbim, my stupid ideas about family time and then some, we made it to the summit of Mt Baldy after one hour and forty minutes.  We stopped a few times to allow Seffy to catch up and to give water to Gina.  She was hyperventilating in fear from the gunshot at the rifle range directly below Mt Baldy.  Her eyes were like moons and her tongue was swollen and hanging to the side.  By the time we summited, there was no more gun fire and Gina had relaxed.  Even Seffy, knowing the end was nigh, had stopped snapping.

     Lunch was delicious.  Tuna and cream on rice thins with Lindsay Jue Sue’s Prozac pickle, a biting mix of choko, cucumber and capsicum in chilli ginger vinegar.  It is guaranteed to pick you up when you feel wasted (after a long, hot walk with dogs and children) and put a smile on your face and a spring in your step.

     However I discovered Lindsay’s pickle had another medicinal quality I reckon he doesn’t know about.

     When I reached the summit I noticed an obstinate leech on my shin.  

Leech well and truly attached, mouth at the left end.

     I hadn’t thought about leeches otherwise I’d have brought along tea-tree oil with the snake bandages and pain killers.  But I had an idea.  I took a birds eye chilli from Lindsay’s pickle, rubbed it on the leech and marvelled at the speed with which it recoiled.  

     While I ate the remaining pickles I waited for the murderous itch that follows leech removal, something to do with the anti-coagulant the slimy worm injects.  It never came possibly because my skin had been burned by the chilli.

Tony didn’t notice his leech otherwise he’d have been able to use Lindsay’s Leech Lifting Lotion!

     In the car, we all heaved a sigh of joyous relief and the dogs flopped down for a well-earned sleep.  I thanked everyone for a wonderful family walk and my heart swelled with infinite love. I thought I might burst with happiness.  

     As Sutchy pulled out of the car park, Kibby asked, ‘Now can we go to Big W to buy my school shoes?’ 

A felfie of old friends

Last week the kids and I met up with dear friends, Gisela and Birgit.  When we arrived in Bougainville in 1984, Gisela and Bert were our neighbours, a little family then then five-year-old Birgit (Karl arrived soon after).  Twenty years ago, Gisela and Birgit were two of the thirteen guests at our wedding reception. We don't catch up often enough.

     So when I found out Birgit was visiting Gisela from Newman with her two gorgeous boys we had to catch up.  We plonked ourselves on the banks of the Dirran Creek on the farm and chatted while my kids and Birgit's spent hours floating between a plastic canoe and a blow-up biscuit.

     Birgit took a 'self-shot' of us.  Now if a selfie is a shot of oneself and a couplie is a shot of a couple (lovers or friends) and belfie is a shot of one's bum, what is a self-shot of three people?  A trelfie or a triflie?  And more specifically, four people?  A fourfie or a felfie?  

The colours of sleepy, mysterious Atherton

 For the first couple of months in Atherton, Gina Rose and I walked the criss-cross of streets behind the CBD daily. I considered this area the heart of the town.  Gina Rose's waistline vanished in Cairns and in it's place was the equivalent of a B-Double tyre! My walking expeditions were two-fold;  exercise for a fat Jack Russell (she was not happy) and a chance to discover my new home in a slow and personal way. 

     
     I was enchanted by the old Queenslanders, some renovated, some dilapidated.  The deserted streets were wide and sleepy and each had a middle verge dominated by towering raintrees, jacarandas, figs and flames-of-the-forest.   Time seemed to have stopped, the residents nowhere to be seen. Once I passed three children, that was it. A tire hanging from a Jacaranda tree in the middle verge was always childless.  There was a strange absence of dogs pacing fence-lines and cats curled upon wooden porches. 
     Even traffic avoided the the four streets that bordered this little piece of last century, Main and Louise running north-south and Robert and Cook running east-west.  The almost eerie ambience buzzed with the cicadas in the warm early evenings.  

     Only after dark did life resume; the drone of the ABC news, the clink of cutlery against plates, the cry of a tired child, a dog yapping or the mellow tones of Jazz drifting on the spring evenings.  
     

I wandered and wondered about the lives and stories woven through the tongue and groove walls, the rusted corrugated roofing and the peeling paint on the picket fences in this oldest part of town.  The hands that crafted some of these dwellings and others that tended the hearth, clashes between the white settlers and traditional owners (Butcher's Creek wasn't named for a purveyor of fresh meet), the Chinese clearing plots for market gardens, husbands and sons going to war, the panic of parents when epidemics of whooping cough and measles took hold, prayers for rain to nourish crops and pastures. I was mesmerised by the architecture, the quaint English rose beds, wild backyard vegetable gardens with tomatoes vines spilling over wooden fencing, the charcoal ruins of a massive Queenslander, apparently home to squatters.  My interest in Atherton's heart bordered on the obsessive as I plotted a dark novel.    I looked forward to our late afternoon ritual with macabre fascination.  I needed another focus, especially since Gina Rose's truck tyre was bogged around her middle.  
     I abandoned our sunset ambling for something more aerobic and less morbid.  If Gina Rose resented our gentile strolling, she was about to despise me for dragging her vertically along the bush track of Mt Widow Maker.

The world according to Kibbim

"Holy shit, Mum, a bum crack!"

I saw a heart, the soles of bare feet (heels together), inverted commas with nothing in between, two halves of a whole, conjoined Kipfler potatoes.  I did not see a bum crack. Oh, how simple life would be when viewed with the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.

Oh, the shame, the shame!

How it hurt when I walked into Dad's room to get something. Seven years in the making and My Island Homicide ends up as a support for a thirty year-old Bonair.  Not even a full support, but a part of one. Mind you, MIH was in good company - The Golden Ratio, Spices of the World and Christmas Island, Indian Ocean and more.

     I partly consoled myself with the story, perhaps literary myth, of Bryce Courtney's manuscript, The Power of One, spending its early years as a doorstop ... till someone suggested he send it to a publisher. Except MIH came from the publisher.  Err.  

I give up

Over the years I have struggled to get my kids reading.  I don’t expect them to love reading.  I simply want them to be able to read, understand the meaning and communicate effectively with words.  The fact is this: if they have a good grasp of literacy, they are better able to negotiate school and then have more choices when it comes to a career.

     Naturally they were read to as babies and toddlers and they had a fabulous library.  However when they entered school, they seemed to lose interest in the written word and it escalated over time.  I did everything, anything to inspire them to read. I bought books of all genres, engaged tutors, bought educational computer programs, signed up for Reading Eggs (used once like Study Ladder and Mathletics) and God knows how many other online learning gigs, read to them, have them read to me, paid them to read to me (in year 7 TK and I read a chapter each of The Third Son and he had one chapter left to earn $10 taped to the back cover - he refused), I’ve bought and played every conceivable word puzzle; Boggle, Scrabble, Upwords (first in the kids’ and later adult versions) and so on.  All I have achieved is a parting with dollars and fractured relationships.  I knew to back off, but then school reports reminded me I needed to support them.  It was a destructive cycle.  

     Just before Christmas 2014 I came up with a cunning and fail-proof plan to get them reading and also writing.  Sick of them refusing to read and fed up with their derogatory comments about my desire to get them reading, I took a vow of silence.  I typed up a page and a half letter to My dear family and handed it to the Rooster to read.

     He read that I would not speak for thirty days although I would communicate in writing and only accept written responses providing the grammar, punctuation and spelling was correct.  The Rooster read ‘fertile’ for ‘futile’ and ‘expectation’ for ‘exception’ so I knew I was doing the right thing.  He also read out how I loved my family dearly, I was desperate to do what a good mother would do and this strategy was a last resort.

     ‘Yours, Cate and Mum,’ said the Rooster as he handed me the letter and walked off.  ‘Goodnight.’

     ‘Goodnight,’ said Kibby and he went to bed.

     ‘Goodnight,’ said Seffy and she went to her room.

     A stony silence thickened around Tony.  

     I assumed they’d come to see my wisdom over the next thirty days.

     Of course, I needed something for us all to write in and what better to use than the New Scientist diary my father gave me for my birthday in 2011.  How portentous!  A clean slate for a new start, one that would finally be successful.  I fanned the blank pages, savouring the faint scent of mildew.  However I noticed handwriting on the first page.  I fetched my glasses.  It was my handwriting.

     Family meeting.  20 December, 2011.

     I read the notes and remembered the mutinous meeting where much was promised in terms of children’s behaviour and nothing delivered.

     The Family Meeting book had just become the Vow of Silence book.  I turned to the next blank page and wrote, Vow of Silence 19 December, 2014.

     To cut a long story short, I lasted three blissful days for at the end of the third day there was a small crisis involving a stool sample, a young woman, a country highway, a deadline in another town.  Spoken language was imperative for the situation.  I spoke to the Rooster and the crisis was averted.

     My family mocked me for reneging on my vow.  I gave up on the learning and literacy front and shelved my Family Meeting-cum-Vow of Silence book.  It was too stressful for me.  Tony and the kids could go to hell … until, three weeks later Tony insisted on allowing the kids an hour or more of TV a day, crap TV, that was.  

     I risked humiliation and called a family meeting.  I found the Family Meeting-cum-Vow of Silence book and turned to the next blank page and wrote, Family Meeting 11 January, 2015.

     After a shaky start, there were raised voices (not just mine), cynical comments (not mine), terse reprimands (not mine), clarification (not mine), submissions about scientific research (only mine) and finally we all agreed that if each weekday the kids read for 30 minutes and wrote for 30 minutes and worked with numbers for 30 minutes (the Rooster didn’t need to do maths) they earned 30 minutes of TV/DVD time providing they stood to watch the screen (no couch slouch).  If they read for an hour, they got to stand and watch TV for an hour.  Read for two hours, stand and watch the screen for two hours.

     We all signed the Family Meeting book.

     By the third night, no one had done the required reading, writing or maths, but then no one had watched TV.  A pyrrhic victory!

     Later that night the Rooster announced he was going to watch TV.

     ‘How can that be?’ I asked him in my calmest voice.  ‘You haven’t read today or written.’

     ‘Well, I thought I could read the subtitles in one of those French movies on SBS for half an hour and then read for another half an hour and another half an hour.  You'd be happy if I read for that long.’

     I really have given up now.