When I was twenty-two I took the photos of my ex-boyfriend Paul and cut him out of the frame then set a match to the amputated pile in the kitchen sink.
Smoke curled . To my mother, Paul, as an Australian lack culture
She said it often enough in my childhood to believe she was onto something.
What’s culture? My mind ricocheted to the men working on building sites in the suburbs erecting yet another AV Jennings special on the back blocks of Cheltenham.
I did not ask her to elaborate on the word culture, but my mind shot off to my father’s art books with all those images inside, mainly of half or fully naked women leaning on one another or draped across beds with one flopping to the floor as if they had lost all ability to hold themselves together.
Was this culture?
This was not Australian. Not like the scenes of the bush by Hans Heysen, another European, who like my mother, likely longed for home.
Home was a long way off and this place where I was born felt foreign from the get-go. While our name attracted derision for its foreignness. The difficulty of Schooneveldt.
Was this culture?
Surely culture was a good thing because my mother used the word ‘lack’, and in her choice she hinted at loss and sorrow. As if culture rested elsewhere, in Europe, her home.
Did I have culture?
Was culture a skill or was it more an aptitude for fitting in?
When I was in my final year of school the nuns awarded me a book for what they called academic excellence. Not because I was an extraordinarily gifted child, as I saw many others around me, but because I was conscientious, handed in my homework on time and knew how to string polite words together.
My mother loved the beach and on weekdays during holidays when we took the blue bus to Mentone and staked out our yellow piece of sand, sandwiched between all the heaving bodies that came in view on hot summer days, my mother looked across the still waters and pined for home.
There over the sea is my home. My family.
I knew then these people way away over the water were the people who oozed culture from their fingertips. While I simply clumped through life carelessly, whose BBC English voice cultivated under the care of Catholic nuns in a blue stone boarding school and by listening to the announcers on the ABC whose rounded vowels reminded me of the late queen, the plum in the mouth, pomposity of the regal family.
Only later I developed the clang and nasal twang of the inveterate Australian and lost all sense of culture.
When I revisit the land of my birth after a trip away over the seas and look at the colour of the sky, those luminescent blues. I think of poetry.
But I do not know this thing called poetry
The way people find words and convert them into shapes with meanings that fly off the page.
In every word ,a lifetime.
In every image, a universe.
In every cloud, the promise of what lies behind.
I do not know how to write a poem.
I tried when I was young seated under the Lombardy poplars
on the abandoned Farm Road estate of my childhood.
I was Elizabeth Barret Browning with her list of ways to love.
My pencil and notebook in my lap.
I looked to the blue above for inspiration but found none.
I cannot write a poem, not like the poets.
They have a way with words and images,
cadences and syntax,
of summers and snow,
of frosts
To settle on the ground of our minds.
Cultured, educated, refined. I can do a fair impression but I take more pride in being working class. For all my creative endeavours I liked being known as the linchpin in whatever organisation I ended up, the one who could be counted on. I was never as indispensable as I imagined—bit of ego creeping in there—but things always ran smoother when I was there. No one cared what my IQ was or how many poems I’d had published. But people got a worker.
And as far as the poetry goes, I take pride in being thought of as a working-class poet. Maybe that’s by bathos is creeping into my writing more and more. Poets are supposed to elevate; I like to take down a peg or two.
On the photo thing, I did tear up the only two photos I had of my first proper girlfriend as a gesture to her replacement. That I bitterly regret to this day.