Tag: Bob Santamaria

The sorrow of failing to give our first peoples a voice, and the art of Boxing

On this sad day on which many of the people with whom I live in this vast country Australia have decided against giving a voice in parliament to our indigenous people, my cheeks are flush with shame. 

Yesterday as I took my place in the queue outside our polling booth noticed a man whom I have often run across in the dog park. A friendly man with a Jack Russell with whom my daughter and I compare notes as we wander around Fritz Holzer Park together. A man around my age, maybe a few years younger, who looks to be retired as he walks during the day on weekdays and has plenty of time to chat with the locals. 

There he was unashamedly advocating for people to vote against the voice for indigenous people and shutters went down on him in my estimation. I will never look at him in the same way. I will never be fooled by his ostensible kindness. I will never look upon him as a friendly person. He has dropped in my esteem, and I can’t see him clawing his way back. 

Not that he would try. Not that I would expect him to. I will not speak to him of my disappointment. No point. But I’ll not spend many minutes chatting with him in the dog park, however civil I might be. 

And much as I’m appalled at my sudden dislike of this man for his conservative and to my mind narrow politics I am appalled at how quickly I can lose esteem for another person. This is the stuff of the polarising effect of politics. The way government decisions can estrange tribes of people and make us enemies of one another. 

I’m as bad as the next person.

It was easier when I was little before politics entered my mind, though I knew my parents were concerned about issues like getting government aid to Catholic schools. I did not understand when they joined the Democratic Labour Party, the DLP, a conservative group that broke off from the Labor Party in 1955 to form its own tribe, largely with the support of anti-communist Catholics. Mainly because of the demands of their religion to get help to fund their schools. And from fear. The DLP has little traction these days, but my parents once admired them. 

The DLP was led by the formidable Bob Santamaria, a conservative self-seeking autocrat if ever there was one. But how were my parents to know? I did not participate in politics until the 1970s when the It’s Time slogan hit our airwaves and Labor rose to ascendance at last after more than two decades of Liberal party rule. My first taste of the joy of your party succeeding with all those hopes for a better future. 

The cyclical push and pull of life. The way political parties, if they do not take over as dictatorships can swing from right to left, from progressive to conservative over a decade all based on how they’re perceived to perform by most people who pitch their own vested interests against one another. 

I wore fuchsia coloured gym pants, close fitting, a type I have not worn before to my first day in a gym. I chose them from a variety of gym clothes not only for their bright colour but also because the young woman at the Bonds store who was helping me suggested they’d be right for the occasion. 

The occasion being my first ever in a series of classes I will attend over the next eight weeks called Left Write Hook, where I will learn the art of boxing and also have an opportunity to share my story with a group of other women, all of us carrying around a sack full of trauma from our pasts, some sacks heavier than others, but all of us suffering a type of disconnect from our bodies, which we developed as a way of coping when we were small. 

Yesterday, after we first met one another and shared snippets of our stories in an initial warm up we had time to write to various prompts. Short moments of writing, for four minutes only, and then we shared our writing if we were comfortable after which Maryanne our boxing teacher took us through our paces. 

A remarkable process whereby the shift from head and mind to body was palpable. When you learn to box, when you learn to raise your fits, well-padded in readiness for the gloves into fight position to protect your face, and you enter a different zone. It took me a while to adjust to the various movements: jab, cross, hook and upper cuts. To me a new language for ancient movements from decades gone by enjoyed by men but now anyone can try. 

I had thought it might be good for me. I had no idea how good. The business of doing something together with a bunch of strangers, all of us relatively new to the activity, all of us rusty except for our teacher and facilitator, and all of us bonding in a way that went beyond my expectations. 

Although I felt I had no right to be there given I had topped the age limit they recommend, I chose to put myself out there in my fuchsia leggings so that I might grow stronger in my body and not simply in my mind.

On this sad day when the Australian people have failed our first nations people in the most contemptible of ways, by failing to give them a voice, I have begun to find another voice, not one that comes from my throat, tongue and mouth, but the unspoken voice of movement. The voice of my arms able at last to express some of the feelings inside packed tight and let them fly.

They clinched it with this one. This bringing together of people with shared experiences of disempowerment as children and as women and aligned their experiences with an opportunity to share our voices, written and spoken and then to take our place on the floor, two or three centred around the vast black bags which we punch, those bags, the opposition of our lives. 

For the first time we can give voice and fists to all the inner energy pent up inside, and we do so at own pace. Swear, curse, and breathe. All in one as we make our way out of stiff frozen bodies into a state of movement that allows for growth. 

His plaything

The algae in the dog bowl grows
back as fast as I can clean it out, a dark green velvet on the base of his
otherwise blue bowl.  It has the
appearance of close shaved moss and when stirred up makes the water murky.  
I am vigilant about keeping up the
dog’s water supply.  Dogs unlike
cats need a constant and fresh supply. The dog has none of the cats’ ingenuity
in locating water. 
If only new ideas grew as readily
as algae, or at least fresh and good ideas, but they’re as hard to keep up with
as fresh water.  They take
effort.  At this time of the year,
so close to its beginning, I have run dry. 
My father came home with his first
television set when we lived in Healesville in a log cabin styled house nestled
in the valley off Myers Creek Road. 
Reception proved a problem in those days and it was necessary to fix an
aerial to the roof, stiff and angular like a scarecrow, but not a scarecrow to
scare off birds, rather a scarecrow that might draw in sounds and
frequencies.  
As well we had a
small portable aerial that sat either on top of the television itself or nearby
and needed constant adjusting whenever the picture began to run reel by reel
over and on top of itself. 
Sometimes one of us needed to hold the aerial in a particular way
throughout the entire movie to stop the picture on the screen from warping and
running on.  
The frustration of early television
watching was only matched by the pleasure of entering into this new black and
white world where people in the movies never seemed to bother with the trivia
of life like earning a living or going to the toilet.  
Why ever not? 
Why did these people in movie land not need things like toilets or
money?  They ate food occasionally,
or at least they gave some impression of eating in so far as they sat in front
of a table of food set for dinner but rarely did they hoe in.  
They reminded me of the nuns at school, those black robed women whose bodies were completely concealed under layers of
material.  They never ate or used
the toilet, or so I imagined as a child. 
Underneath their bodies were not like ours.  They did not therefore need to function as did we with eating
and elimination.  Nuns were
pure. 
Advertisements were the most
intriguing aspect of television in those days, the way the model, the beautiful, bright smiling, impeccable model might bite into a chocolate coated ice
cream.  
You could hear the crunch
of chocolate as it cracked but never a drip of ice cream dribbled down the model’s chin, and although she closed her mouth over the bite and smiled broadly as if
savouring the sweetness, I imagined a spittoon nearby into which she might spit
out the concoction, mostly because I had heard such advertisements take many
cuts to make and if she needed to eat all that ice cream over and over again she
would soon be sick.
By the time I reached adolescence
my imagination was caught up in the bodies of these actors.  The way a man might hold a beautiful
woman close to him to kiss her or to dance with her and she wore a backless dress.  His hot hand stroked up and down her
back.  I imagined him doing the
same to my back in horror.  My back
by then was lumpy with pimples. 
I spent my time comparing myself to
these on screen heroes and heroines imagining that no such life awaited
me.  I was too imperfect.  Too hungry, too spotty, too poor to be on screen. 
By the time we left Healesville and
moved to Canterbury, my TV tastes had changed from preferring a rich diet of
cartoons, only available in the late afternoon, to the midday movie which we
watched as often as possible while our father was away at work during school
holidays.
When our father was at home, he
commandeered the box.  He decided
on boring stuff, the equivalent of Meet the Press with Bob Santamaria or the News, but we preferred Disneyland with
its choice of destinations, Frontier land, Adventure land, Fantasy land, of
which trips into fantasy land usually in the form of cartoons or fairy tales was my
preferred destination. 
One day, I must have been around
thirteen years old and conscious of my body in a different way;  conscious that tiny breasts were
beginning to bud on my chest; conscious that I was beginning to outgrow my
clothes at a much faster rate; conscious that my underarms and pubic bone were
sheathed in fine hairs; and conscious of my father as he sat me on his lap in
front of the television. 
We were watching Brian Henderson’s Bandstand.  Singers and musicians
performed while my father played with the zipper at the back of my dress in unison to the music.
My father stank of alcohol and of
cigarettes as he rode the full length zip up and down so that my entire back
was one minute exposed the next covered. I wanted to get off his lap but felt
glued to the spot.
I wondered that my mother who sat
in a chair only inches away with her eyes fixed to the television set did not
notice my father, or not so much my father as my discomfort at what he was
doing. She smoked a cigarette, while tears rolled down my cheeks. 
Silent tears. I did not dare let my father know that I objected to his zip
pulling. 
It felt wrong, as if my father were
doing something he should not do, as if he were teasing me the way he liked to tease my
mother when he tried to take her apron off as she stood at the kitchen stove. 
When she pushed him away he
lurched for her and she pulled back. 
He ripped at her dress and tore the front half away from her body.  My mother stood in shock in her
petticoat.  Bits of dress fell to the floor and my father looked triumphant as if
he had exposed her at last. 
Was this what he was doing
here?  All this activity on the
television and my mind was a jumble of thoughts about the drama going on in our
lounge room, only no one could see but me and my father.  To this day I am
not sure how conscious he was of what he was doing, or of how he had made me
feel. 
I was his plaything.