From 'Memoirs of a Travelling Sheila' - Gay Hawkes

We were sitting on bar stools in the Lord Newry listening to people reading poetry. The bloke beside me, a plumber from Greensborough, clapped politely when someone finished reading some abysmal poems.

“What did you do that for?” I asked him. “That was shit."

“I know,” he said, “ but that’s civilisation."Gay Hawkes, 'Seeking Civilisation'

Ever since then I have been searching for it everywhere, this strange and elusive thing called 'civilisation'. I think the nearest I might have come to it was in Belfast, reading Synge in the Linenhall Library or in the Bookfinders with a cup of tea, writing, reading, listening to opera and the young Irishman asking if he could read me his new poem….or in the Kitchen Bar with the barman saying, “Would you rather a poem or a song?”

But it must have been more than this or why did our forefathers make such an effort to bring it from Europe and then to spread it like manure over this land?

 

This morning a largish pilot whale was lying in the water at my shed – dead and lost. Yesterday, it wandered all around this bay, sometimes being coaxed by people into deeper water, but, every time returning to the shallows and even getting stuck beneath the slipway. No one could help it really, then this morning there it was between my door and the abalone sheds.

Trucks, carrying some of the Marian Bay pod, passed through Dunalley yesterday and Marian Bay itself was a circus. Emergency services people everywhere in orange, with a roadblock and papers to sign to gain access to the beach. There were media, police, Hobart gawkers/helpers, hundreds of cars and so many people.

I felt sad that they bull-dozed the whales in the minute they breathed their last, as I wanted to touch them and ponder and feel what was happening rather than see the efficiency of our bureaucratic services. I was told they cut up some of the whales with axes to get at their guts. Humans are queer. Knowing so much and, yet, so little and always wanting to know more.

There was a whale in the canal being fussed over by the locals. Its thin black glad-wrap skin was broken and bleeding dark red blood as they pushed it about. Then the men in orange turned up with their toys and winched it up onto a truck. As it was lifted from the water it shuddered in agony.

“Leave it alone,” I shouted in horror. But they loaded it onto the truck for a journey to the Neck and at Murdunna it died.

 

I went to the city today, by tram, to be part of Weary Dunlop’s funeral, for my son and for myself and from respect. Thousands of people lined the streets by Princes Bridge. I stood outside St.Paul’s Cathedral amongst them, listening to the muffled bells and watching the crowds, jammed together with the people of this country. The women beside me were discussing state funerals. I said that the gun carriage should have been pulled by horses rather than an army truck and one woman replied: “Queen Vic had horses and when they went too fast round a corner the casket fell off”.

“It wouldn’t have hurt ‘er,” someone said behind.

And later when they strapped the casket onto the gun carriage she said “Not like Viccy”.

There was a lone piper as they left the church, the music confused by the bells, but beautiful. I think they played The Flowers of the Forest. Then the army band played the Funeral March as the whole cortege went slowly past Flinders Street Station and up St. Kilda Road to the shrine. I had to go into Young and Jacksons for a drambuie. On the way home a bloke on the tram said “Who else in Australia would draw a crowd like that?”

And we couldn’t think of anyone.

 

Wayne built a grandstand in the backyard under coconut palms on the edge of the beach. There was a bank of TV screens. About 30 drinkers came with little children and huge dogs, toddlers staggering about in disposables, everyone sucking on beer cans, sausages, pies and beer. Most impressive was a giant from Port Douglas called 'Teddy Four-Mile' and Percy 'purple-black', with Raylene his wife, blonde, dressed in white, and lots of what G. called “white trash”. Lurching up and down bleachers, people passed out, then revived to drink some more, fight and argue, shout, turn up the music, drink some more then pass out again. Two days later it was still on, babies staggering abandoned, it seemed, amongst the bodies and rubbish, dogs, cans and fires.

Wayne still upright and presiding.

I wandered down to the shore in a tearing hot wind and sudden rain squalls. The waves raced with determination way past high tide mark so I swam almost under the palms. After dark we were eating inside our place, next door, when Wayne staggered in and said “I’ve had 94,000 beers!” then passed out. We took off his clothes and dressed him in a scarlet rock-star suit with black lapels. He looked superb with his brown belly exploding over the pants.

 

A dead dog lay in the street near the shop, bloated and stinking, its legs in the air. Over the weekend the stink increased and we wondered if we would wait until after the weekend for Council workers to remove it. It was far too hot to think of digging a hole.

Then another dog died on its owner’s steps after being shot by a pilot. By Monday, both dogs had been dumped in open drums in the street.Gay Hawkes, 'Dogs in the Tanami'

Yesterday, the four brumby ponies were dashing across the airstrip pursued by a pack of dogs. The pilots are concerned about the danger of so many dogs running on the strip and now have permission from the Community Council to shoot them.

The bloke who found his dog dead on the steps assumed that it had been shot right there - a big tabu – and grabbed his mulla-mulla, threatening to chuck the carcase in the pilot’s car. I was walking back from the Health Centre with treatment for scabies and barcoo rot when I heard him.

This morning I watched the coupling of two dogs beside the strip. The bitch is the same diseased, one-eyed, festering creature which lurks by my gate hoping for food. 'Ghost dog' we call it. Stuck together, end to end with the large male which mounted her, she stood, pathetic as ever, until the pack from the school tore along and yapping and fighting, made off with the male.

It is very hot today and the wind is unseemly.

 

My father had two sayings about blood. One of them was: “You haven’t done anything ‘til you’re bleeding, love”. Another, which he always said when he could see I was upset, was “My heart bleeds for you, love”, uttered with great feeling as he gripped my shoulder.

It’s rather masochistic, even Calvinistic, isn’t it – you haven’t done anything until you’re bleeding. He said it to me in his workshop with the thin skin broken on his capable hands, as he made the furniture for our house at the weekends in his dug-out workspace. Blood would drip onto his work and I’d want to rush up for a bandaid or bandage but he would stop me, say it with a grin and work on regardless.

My Dad passed it onto me so that now, with my own thin-skinned hands, if I see blood on my work, I feel proud. I have pressed on at times despite cutting the top off a finger, gashing thumbs with the vicious teeth of a bowsaw and planing off part of a finger with an electric plane. Stoic, eh.

Gay Hawkes, 'Blood' I have just watched a programme on ABC TV called Crossing the Line. Two young medical students from Hobart were sent to Mornington Island for an eight week placement as part of their training. After seven weeks they were pulled out by the Remote and Rural Health body in Mount Isa because their hearts bled. They bled over the conditions on the island and their young, naïve desire to “make a difference” and to be more than just a doctor in a clinic who never ventures out into the nitty-gritty reality of the community.

I was reminded of my own experiences in remote communities. Like those students, I learnt that despite my bleeding heart, and perhaps because of it, I couldn’t contribute much in a short time and like most whiteys I soon returned to the comfort of my own place in Australia. What I learnt was that although I was a teacher I was the one doing the learning. On Cape York I learnt that it is very hard to lie awake at night listening to women screaming ….my blood running cold.

It is surely not wrong to have a bleeding heart? But like the medical students, what to do with it?

I remember the Lajamanu Health Clinic in the Tanami Desert, a small building ingrained inside and out with red dust. There was no doctor in Lajamanu just a stocky black nurse called 'Shorty' who consulted an old well-thumbed medical manual, dished out paw-paw ointment for all maladies, including barcoo rot and who loved flash shirts.

I once had a plant in my garden on Tunnel Hill called Love Lies A’Bleeding. The night we booked the butcher’s boy to come up to slaughter our goat my young son and I were watching it cavorting over these blood-red plumes.

“It’ll be a bleeder itself before the night’s out,” said my boy.

The butcher’s boy didn’t come. He had gone to the pub for courage and gotten too drunk.

 

Brickhills had books and so did two narrow ladies from the Brethren in a bookshop between Brickhills and the bank opposite the Town Hall. Then they moved to the new arcade near Clockie Joyce’s jewellers. Their shop had a strange religious smell and they were very plain.

There were plenty of strong smells in Burnie. Like the Mia –Mia café where you could buy ice-blocks made from Reckitt's Blue Bag and Nat Browns, which was famous for the smell of dead horse coming from beneath the floorboards, or was it old clothes and dust? Tas Farmers and Moran and Cato sold Gay Hawkes, 'Burnie'produce from large wooden vats with hinged lids and smelt like farms. Cox Bros, next to Terry O’Toole, had those little brass boxes on strings which whizzed overhead as my mother took dresses 'on appro'.

A girl in a high cage sent the change whizzing back. It was as good as a circus.

Terry O’Toole had a Tasmanian Devil in a cage and a sign which read Beautiful Burnie, Bride of the Sea. There was sea on West Beach and in Emu Bay. Frothy, brown polluted sea, which smelt like home, full of caustic but we didn’t know, lignin and brown liquor from the Mill. Everyone worked at the Mill. It sent its smoke into the sky every day except Christmas and 16,000 tons each year of sulphuric acid onto the washing and onto cars and the dusty white company houses along the beach.

My Mother bought me The Book of Beauty from the Brethren ladies and so I met Gerard Manley Hopkins’ pied and dappled things.

And “come live with me and be my Love” and promises of myrtle.

 

Gay Hawkes is and artist/writer who lives and works in Tasmania (and sometimes other places).