Less is more work

Albury writer Robyne Young recently introduced a group of us to the idea of the ‘zero draft,’ the brain dump that precedes any attempt to craft a narrative or sequence your material. American poet Ellen Bass says that the best writing contains only the essential and recommends you first express the whole of your idea in all its detail then ‘weed out the inessential’. I realise that the prose pieces I’ve written often recount incidents in such detail that they may bore the reader, or as my spouse says, would only be of interest to someone who knows you (i.e. tell someone who cares).

It is easier to be economical in poetry. It is by nature succinct, impressionistic. But with a story to tell I am tempted to provide information about the weather, how I know the people involved, the names of places and types of vehicle etc. While I know less is more, making more less is hard work.

Ellen Bass source: https://lectures.org/event/ellen-bass/

I was ready to shelve 2,000 plus words of recent prose that fell into these traps when I encountered Bass’s advice. Then I had coffee with, Karen, who features in the anecdote and discussed it with her. Perhaps I could redeem the piece with weeding and capturing only what was notable about the experience we shared.

Karen was my companion for a 500 km trip to my cousin Beryl’s funeral. We both wanted to say goodbye, but also to put in a plea for her boxes of genealogical material. Beryl was my first cousin once removed, Karen is distantly related to Beryl’s late husband. We’d only met a couple of times before our road trip. It was nice to have a seasoned traveller as a companion. Karen has lived in five states. Her bumper sticker reads: ‘NICKINGOFFAGAIN’. 

Karen instigated most of our conversations en route. We skated from topic to topic: astrology (she is a Libra), political corruption (she believes some of the money disgraced MP Darryl Maguire got former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to ‘throw at’ Wagga remains unaccounted for) and history, family and social (European bees were introduced to Australia in 1822 because native bees did not produce enough honey). Her driving style is likewise fluid (she drove because I found out too late that her car is a manual which I can’t drive). A passenger’s perspective can be skewed, but it felt like we almost brushed against trucks to our left a few times and we definitely drubbed against the corrugations on the outer edge of the road. Karen gestured extravagantly as she spoke, sometimes leaving the gear stick and steering wheel briefly untouched then taking skilful corrective action when she had made her point.

100% accurate description of Libran characteristics  - sources: Karen and https://www.astrosage.com/zodiac/libra-woman.asp

Our destination was the Squid’s Ink Inn, on the shores of Lake Macquarie. On arrival the manager, a surly man in his 30s, assigned us our rooms stating that he had already charged both to Karen’s credit card. Karen deemed him ‘shonky’ as we had intended to pay for our accommodation separately and he should not have processed the payment at all until we arrived and checked in. I reimbursed Karen by paying for dinner in the motel restaurant. Sorted, we thought.

The next morning we strolled by the lake then set off at about 9.30 am for Beryl’s funeral which was scheduled for 11 am at Lake Macquarie Memorial Park. Google Maps showed it as being about twenty minutes away so we had ample time.  I pressed ‘start’ on Google Maps directions but we soon realised that we were looping back through the same roads. Karen exclaimed ‘we’ve driven past those same trees four or five times and they haven’t grown any’…

Then we saw tall whirls of smoke on the horizon and hit a diversion set up by emergency services. Time was getting tight. We lost the GPS signal and I re-entered our destination. In minutes we found ourselves on the motorway to Sydney and our trip time recalculated to over an hour. Turns out there is an almost identically named funeral facility on Sydney’s north shore. Karen remained calm and even tempered, but my vagus nerve was having none of it. Suddenly finding a loo was more urgent than honouring my cousin’s passing. A search for conveniences proved fruitless. We spied some secluded bushland where a council ute was parked on a gravel turning circle. Karen pulled in,  passed me a box of Kleenex and I legged it into the vegetation. Karen engaged the driver in conversation and obtained accurate directions to the Memorial Park.

We arrived about 40 minutes late and shuffled into a pew in the chapel behind the assembled friends and relatives just as the minister was concluding her remarks. I had never been to an interment. I was truly grateful that Beryl had opted for burial as it gave us a second chance to pay respects. We followed the coffin on its gurney down a gentle hill amongst rose bushes and immaculately trimmed hedges to the graveside. There we exchanged hugs and handshakes, memories and stories. Beryl’s granddaughter read Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep. We all stood and wept.  Then we each collected a gerbera from the funeral director to place on the coffin before it was lowered into the grave and out of sight. The atmosphere at the wake was friendly. Karen and I had a chance to talk genealogy with various guests and secured a promise from the family that Beryl’s papers would find their way to Wagga.

View of Lake Macquarie from the Squid' Ink Inn (my photo)

Too weary to contemplate the long drive home, we booked another night at the Squid’s Ink Inn specifying that we wanted to be charged separately. When we drove up all the parking spaces were taken. The manager, with an unwarranted show of magnanimity (we were paying guests after all) let us park in the driveway of his onsite accommodation.  Karen reiterated to me that she distrusted him. The next morning he happily processed my room payment on my credit card and it was not until we returned home that Karen found he had also charged her for two more nights’ accommodation i.e. my room had been billed to both of us. It took a six month long campaign of dispute resolution for Karen to get the money re-credited. ‘Shonky’ indeed!

We were less chatty on the drive home. Back in Wagga I thanked Karen for chauffeuring, for keeping calm when we got lost and for having that box of Kleenex handy. If we contemplate nicking off again, I hope the reason isn’t a funeral, but our next adventure will be sorting through those boxes of family history records. 

The year of living curiously

I was curious to know what it would be like to live in another place. I was curious to know what it would be like to have a husband who was happy at work and in his skin. Curious to see what cutting free from my public service moorings and courting uncertainty would bring. Curious to experience a different climate, terrain and tempo. Curious to see fresh sights, make new friends and have the time to write.

Curiosity led me to the bush. To the achingly blue skies, unyielding red rock and sinuous mottle-barked gums of the Riverina.   Curiosity killed my cat and rabbits. Curiosity revealed timid black-faced wallabies, spongy-toed marbled geckoes and neat little wood ducks as well as countless tranquil riverside walking tracks.  Curiosity led me to discover unimagined links to our new home. There was my husband's great grandfather, a Melbourne timber getter who tried his hand at taking the telegraph through Tarcutta to Gundagai and perished with a fractured spine in Wagga’s misnamed Hope Inn in 1860. There was the redoubtable, community minded manager of the Union Bank in Henty  and his wife, doyenne of the CWA and debutante balls, and their daughter, my enigmatic third cousin, Norma - they played golf, taught textile arts, judged flower shows and kept Shakespeare alive in the district for over 30 years.

Curiosity precedes uncertainty and is its companion. Once moorings are slipped and routines shed it is necessary to be open, to allow yourself the excitement and discomfort of the unfamiliar.  I hear myself maybe too often pronouncing on the differences between my urban and rural lives. I am noticing what I miss and what I welcome. No salt tang of Sydney Harbour in the air but the nutty smell of Wagga earth and grasses.  Fewer choices to get and to do things, yet such economy and ease of getting and doing.  The strangeness of knowing none of the people you see in the street then the excitement when you start to bump into and chat to new acquaintances.

It has been a year of loss and learning, of loneliness and privilege. I have yearned to see those I love who are now far away and cherished the rare moments I have spent time with them or talked to them. Rejoiced that the internet keeps ties strong and enables sharing of both the profound and the trivial. 

Someone’s momma once said ‘You can’t hurry love, you just have to wait, love don’t come easily, it’s a game of give and take’. The same is true of adjusting to change. Some if it is active pursuit and embrace but much is just openness and  can’t be forced.   A year of curiosity shows us our capacities and  limits, shows us when we baulk or resile  and how we can grow and bend.   It reminds us to continually reassess our perceptions and recalibrate our comfort settings, with compassion towards ourselves and others.  

As Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron says:

Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin the process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings.  We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what is going on.

I expect and hope to get curiouser and curiouser.

Women In The Shadows

I posted a while ago about how I have become hooked on family history.  I continue to make discoveries both great and small: finding  an envelope in an old box of photographs containing three pages of reminiscences written in a shaky hand by my grandmother recalling her early life in Newtown, tracking down through birth announcements, school records and newspaper stories that my second cousin once removed was a champion footballer who won three ‘best and fairest’ player medals and had a Prussian  army captain for a grandfather, learning that one of my great grand aunts became the  single mother of two young girls quite unceremoniously when her husband was arrested for producing and passing forged £1.00 notes and deported to Noumea.

It seems possible that my paternal line is traceable back to Switzerland in 1200 AD, but investigating that is just too mind boggling given that I am challenged enough fleshing out the past four generations in Australia! With the help of a first and a second cousin and various databases, I have been able to piece together quite a lot of my family members’ lives and stories.  Now that I have ‘gone bush’ I can’t easily visit the record repositories, museums and cemeteries that are the haunt of ‘genies’ but it is amazing how much is available online and it is heart-warming how generous other family history buffs  and volunteers at local historical societies can be.  I am as excited now at the arrival of a package of photocopies of documents and pictures as I used to be at the arrival of bric-a-brac I had bought on eBay!

But I have to remark on one complication that hampers my research.  I kept my so-called maiden name i.e. the surname I was born with, both for ideological and practical reasons, when I married back in the 80s.  I had not been bitten by the genealogy bug back then and it never occurred to me that continuity of identity had implications beyond feminist principles and avoiding the mess of changing bank accounts, electoral roll listings etc.  It wasn’t until I saw Armandine Garnay disappear to be replaced by Mrs R. L. Thornber and Regina Louise Pittard morph first into Mrs Charles Norett, re-emerge temporarily as Mrs Regina Norett (widow), only to be subsumed by the moniker Mrs J. B. Wallis (one of three succeeding women to be known by that name) and then to surface briefly as Mrs R.L. Wallis (widow) in the last few years of her life, that I realised how difficult the custom of assuming one’s husband’s name makes family research.  Add to this non-standardised spelling, 'Noirette' for 'Norett' and 'Wallace' for 'Wallis', and it can take a lot of detective work and guesswork to track down female relatives.

Another challenge is what the papers considered newsworthy in past eras. Business ventures and sporting achievements often got a mention so I stumbled upon (male) entrepreneurs, cricketers and footballers in the family quite quickly.  Female golfers and bowls players occasionally made it into the papers’ columns but a single initial and surname are hard to verify as the particular ancestor you’re seeking.  Marriages, births and deaths, assuming the family had the price and presence of mind to post a notice, can be depended upon to an extent. The first two usually reveal the bride’s/mother’s former identity. I remember the first time I heard the term ‘nee’ referring to a woman’s surname prior to marriage. It was on the saucy sit com ‘George and Mildred’ when Mildred was referred to as Mildred Roper (nee Trembler). Boom tish!  Incidentally, the Newcastle region leads the pack in their enthusiasm for printing wedding photographs, their local papers, in my experience,  had by far the richest source of blurry black and white pictures of newly hitched couples back in the 1940s and 50s.

Unless they moved in exalted social circles (none of my forebears really did) or were conspicuously active in the Country Women’s Association (Armandine Thornber nee Garnay was forever demonstrating her spinning or judging at rural shows) not many women featured in the newspapers. Of course women who held  important positions as matrons or headmistresses got some coverage, but shopkeepers, seamstresses, laundresses and those discharging ‘home duties’ (the term the census  used)  like my lot, only featured in the paper if they took out a classified ad selling a pony or a sewing machine.  Nowadays the likes of the Trading Post online and Gumtree and the explosion of social media have made both ‘For Sale’ notices and wedding coverage in newspapers redundant, but they helped to bulk up copy until about the 1980s.

My great grandmother was selling a pony and sulky in 1912.

So large chunks of women’s lives were not revealed in the media and, to my frustration, my female antecedents go ‘off the radar’ for years at a time especially if they weren’t reproducing during that period. Like the veiled mothers in Victorian photographs you may sense their outlines behind their more prominent offspring. Later their attire at their progenies' weddings might attract a few words in a newspaper but not for them election as aldermen, retirement send offs or visits to court to recoup debts or declare bankruptcy.  Even the ratio of industrial accidents and driving offences is firmly weighted along gender lines. While male relatives have had trees fall on them at work, lost fingers on the production line, been pulled over for faulty headlights or charged with indecent language, I have only been able to trace one female in our tree being fined for driving under the influence and she is only a relative by marriage!

 

 

A Victorian 'hidden mother' photograph  - she's there to keep the children from wriggling  but why disguise her?

Thank goodness for Trove (the National Library’s collection database) I have discovered so much trawling through it.  Some of my ancestors got more than their 15 minutes of fame – if they served their country, opened a successful emporium or played a pretty classy game of football – but the women got disproportionate obscurity, some not even accorded their own ‘real’ names in their death notices.   My greatest satisfaction and ongoing quest is to talk to those family members still around today who can throw a light on the shadows they inhabit.