Category: Uncategorized

Online vandals

For the last several days, my blog has been down. Closed for business. Unbeknown to me, it exceeded its bandwidth. In other words, it had taken up more space than it warranted for the month. 

All because some unknown person, persons or cyberbot decided to download thousands upon thousands of pages from within, much more than your average reader might want.

My trusty technological exert tells me, it’s most likely hackers hell bent on mucking up the smooth running of my blog. 

Online vandals who get pleasure out of ruining things for others. 

I’m not taking this personally. I doubt it’s directed at me the person, rather it’s one of those virus type things that float around in cyberspace ready to pounce when ever there’s a gap, rather like the way a virus attacks your body when you’re run down, stressed or otherwise vulnerable.

Not that any of us can ever be immune to viruses in totality. 

We’ve blocked the culprits and hopefully this will be the last of them, but you never know.

If you’re reading this, my blog is back up and running.

Oh, happy day.

No blog, and I felt a whiff of homelessness, that sense of not having a safe space in which to hunker down at night. No place for my thoughts to stretch and turn.

When I was fifteen, I stayed with a family other than my own for several weeks in a type of foster care arrangement to give my parents time to sort themselves out. I did not think of it  as foster care at the time. I thought of it more as visiting another family for the purpose of having a roof over our heads, and regular meals away from the tumult of my father’s erratic behaviour. 

I did not consider my responsibilities in this arrangement were other than to be polite, keep myself in check, help with dishes after meals and otherwise work hard on my studies and participate in family meals. 

All of which I did with varying success. 

I was not alone in this. My younger sister and I shared a double bed installed on the second floor in a large house that looked for all the world as though it had been built in Holland or some other country where the roof sloped down almost all the way to the ground as a way of letting the snow side off. 

No snow in Melbourne as far as I knew but this family was Dutch, more Dutch than my own family in its love of tradition. A family of five, four boys and the youngest, ten years younger than me, a girl. 

I did not know at the time that the mother of this household had agreed to take us on in the hope that we might be like extra daughters, older daughters who might offset some of the burden of the large family by offering to take on part of her share of the washing and maybe even the cooking. 

But we offered nothing. We were of the view that we were there for our convenience and not hers. 

It went awry, three months down the track when my older sister invited us to go to her place for dinner one Friday night. Without telling our hosts back home in our foster home in Camberwell, we accepted the invitation.

I was fifteen and full of myself, full of my own needs and wishes, full to the brim with a sense that if it was ok for me then it should be ok for others. That was until mid-meal when my sister asked if I had told our host mother than we would be missing out on dinner and home late.

I rang my foster mother then and there; my plate empty of my sister’s cooking.

The air froze over the airwaves between us. ‘I have your dinner ready,’ my pseudo mother said. ‘This is not good enough,’ and she hung up. 

I dreaded our return. I dreaded the thought of what she might say when we finally passed through the back door of her Dutch snow house on top of the hill in Camberwell. 

As much as I tried to put it out of my mind during the long train trip back from Cheltenham and the flat in which my older sister lived with a school friend, back to the Dutch house. 

When we reached the back of the house, the screen door was snibbed shut. We knocked several times to silence and finally dared to ring the doorbell. 

Lights went on and the man of the house, the father of this family of five, stood in his brown dressing gown, striped pyjama legs sticking out over wool slippers. 

He unsnibbed the door. 

‘You can’t stay here anymore,’ he said. ‘After you call your sister to take you away in the morning, please stay in your room.’

My threatened homelessness lasted only one night. One night when I could not move, not strip out of my school uniform or get ready for bed. I propped my head on my pillow and panicked for a solution.

In the morning, I would go to the top of the hill and walk down to the presbytery of Our Lady of Victories Church and ask the parish priest to intervene. 

The woman of the house was a devout catholic. The priest could get through to her, soften her, turn her against her intention to eject us. 

 I must have fallen asleep and by the time morning came and with it light, it was too late for the priest and I walked on tip toes down the hallway through to the telephone. My sister promised to come later that morning and I bolted back to my room, terrified of seeing the mother of the house, whom I decided now hated me so thoroughly we could never again make peace.

I never saw my foster mother again, except in photographs, not even to say goodbye. In time she became my older sister’s mother in law, but that’s a whole other story.

At least my blog has been resurrected and I am not homeless. I never was. The nuns took us in as boarders and my younger sister and I entered a different institution where the rules were more clear cut. 

My new home at boarding school.

Enjoy every puddle

A fly flew into my tea this morning and drowned. I fished it out fast and toyed with the idea of starting again, a fresh cup of tea, but then thought the better of it.

A few germs can’t harm me.

Still I flinched at the sight of this tiny black fly, wings stuck to its body, encased there in its funeral shroud of tea. 

In the garden outside, the October roses have gone brown after a full day of rain yesterday and although everything looks washed clean, the garden has the same sad look of that fly, drowned. 

Years ago, after a ferocious drought I promised I’d never begrudge rainfall again. For every puddle I saw thereafter I’d rejoice, and I try to hold firm to this resolution. 

On Monday night I’m going to be part of the audience at the next Q&A session at the ABC studios is Southbank. A bunch of illustrious and brave women will discuss family abuse, among other things. 

Someone gave my daughter tickets and at first I baulked at the thought of another night out but now I’m excited to take part. 

When I was a child I did not think that my father’s violence towards my mother and the rest of us anything out of the ordinary, at least not in our household. I did not give it a label, other than knowing that my father was volatile and prone to fits of rage at the slightest insult especially when he drank. 

I knew too that this was not a thing to be discussed outside our family home. 

At roll call in school when Mother Mary John asked us to give certain family details at the beginning of each year, she asked the names of our fathers and also their occupation. My father was an accountant. I said it with pride. I thrilled at the way he carried behind his long name, Jan Christiaan Schooneveldt, the letters of his qualifications, DipAccCA, or some such thing. I did not think about his other characteristics. Not then in class when I craved respectability.

I longed for the day when I too might attach acronyms to my name, letters from the alphabet placed together in such a way as to suggest achievement.

I find it hard to do so these days. There’s something almost boastful about putting the PhD behind my name and I can’t understand why other than I grew up in a world where we women were taught to be demure and never boastful.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s boasting, big noting yourself, calling attention to your achievements, and yet there are times when I long to tell the world, especially when it comes to my writing, ‘Here, look what I’ve done’. 

I have noticed too that the men around me never seem to have this struggle, this diminishment of pride in their achievements, even the shy ones. 

I enjoy a long correspondence with the writer Gerald Murnane and his last letter to me was one long boast about how pleased he was to have reached eighty and finally to have the recognition he has always believed he deserved. 

Oh, to be so confident. 

I prefer humility in my writers, those who can talk about their writing with pleasure and pride but have no need to rate themselves as anything but writers who have a story to tell. 

When I was a child Mother Mary John made it clear that the worst any of us could be was a notice box. Those children who sought attention from the teacher all the time. 

The boys were the biggest culprits. And mother Mary John punished them by making each stand in an empty rubbish bin on the school veranda for several hours. 

To add to the insult, she tied ribbons in their hair.

No greater insult to a small boy than to tell him he was behaving like a girl and could therefore be seen as a girl. 

I had trouble understanding the logic of this. If the boy was being punished for making a notice box of himself by fidgeting at his desk or flicking paper at his neighbour, how then did that make him like a girl when you considered that ordinarily the girls were the least likely to commit the offence of seeking attention?

Adam Phillip’s the British psychoanalyst puts a different emphasis on seeking attention. He reckons it’s important to seek attention for survival. He also argues that the thing that most gets in the way of attention seeking – in the sense of being curious about the world and people around us – is the issue of shame. 

The problem with shame, it reduces out ability to attend. It closes off our minds to other possibilities. This can’t be a good thing. 

Shame is different from humility. The one a problem, the other a virtue. Though each a problem in excess. 

Shame cuts us off from one another; humility connects us through our shared humanity and ordinariness. It recognises we’re each not the best but we’re good enough. 

The poor fly who flew into my tea did not mean to end its life there. It might have already been at the base of my teacup hidden under the tea bag when I poured in boiling water and floated to the surface to be visible once I added milk. 

Or it might have mishandled a landing on the rim of my cup. 

It all happened so fast. Like life itself. 

It can seem interminable when we’re in it but the older I get the faster it goes, and I know in years to come and for Gerald Murnane, too, we’ll both simply be memories. His greater than mine as his legacy is far greater but in the scheme of things, how much do these thing matter except to our most sensitive and infantile selves who do not want to be forgotten. 

Ever.