Skullthorpe's Blog

There is some triumph
For the battered clot
Of grey tumbled
On the sand.
The disaray of feathers
Won for its kind
A brief statistic
Of species survival.
The tumble of babies
That daily, hourly,
By the minute
That do not die
Store future death.
Locusts strip the
World of green.
Worms eat out the
Apple to a husk.
What will You do
Oh man to justify
your bread
And circuses
To your
Children’s Children’s
Children?

Knife edges,
everywhere
a ridge of stone.
Cutting, ribboned webs –
fronds and fins and flesh (casterneted by sideways scuttle).
Chopping great deaths
to hunks and shards
on our shattered beach.

To much is taken
out of times anguish.
Slaughtered seals,
dismembered dolphins
splayed on the alter
rocks in worship to some
dreadful dollar dream.

Echoing child play,
the squeaking sand of a sundowned walk,
wild horse rides,
the frisking
of a legion of dogs,
a sudden rearing
of waves
at breast or feet
in the glory of rampant surf:
all run cold, red, down
from the ridge of rock,
the knife edge,
at the throat
of our commonality.

What can only rise
with slashed and anguished voices but anger
and more death?
Golfers laugh
like drunken ravens
while it stalks the edges
of their tidy time traps.
Mourning mists cloud
friendships arcs.
Anger brutalizes
chance street meetings.

Small men,
Grotesque
in their self important fancy, count the spoils of desecration.
Money drools shallow fantasies- mansions far from here.
There lives full of things
that,
like them
and their sycophants and dupes,
are bought and sold
like cans of abalone.

Experience isn’t a graph it’s a field in which definitions are emergent as we examine finer and finer grain of detail. 
Broadly when applied to writing fiction in particular it is possible to generalize between preoccupations with the game and with the players.  Writing that tends towards the generic tends to be plot driven (this can also apply to popular biography), while work that has literary intentions tends to be more about motivation,  process and intention. Writing that defines itself as journalism and the sub branches of adverizing and literary criticism tend to be about words  and self conscious cleverness. 
The vexed question of what constitutes good writing centers around how successfully it integrates all of the above in a seamless whole that would dissolve if anything else was added or anything taken away.

A highly talented and entertaining outfit. Lucy, who wrote and sang the songs, revealled a great eye for the detail of people and events that had come to her attention.  Holly and Chris, who played double bass and violin respectivly were skilled performers who played with verve, ingenuity and a deeply felt appreciation of the material.  Delightful people all.

We had the usual difficulty attracting an audience. It seems people will generally only come out if there is a prospect of consuming large quantities of alcohol. I have thought about getting a license to serve the stuff but then people will come, get pissed and talk and laugh over the top of the performers and defeat the purpose.

Unsatisfactory though it is drinking is Mallacoota’s primary form of recreation.

Life being emergent and it’s expression contingent there is little point in talking about meaning and purpose in an objective way. The whole way we perceive the universe and shape those perceptions into ideas is entirely framed by our genetic heritage as the third chimpanze.
Chimpanze life is firmly centered around food and sex.
So our imeadiate unmediated pre occupations for sensual gratification. Any higher order concerns are overlayed over those simple desires.

Talking to Mum about changes. She has seen heaps. Forefront of her mind is the sprawl that has engulfed Cranbourne and creeps every outward. All the fertile farming land going under grids of lot housing sold at grotesque prices to harried families lost in futility. An urban peasantry. The main distinction between these and there medieval cousins is they have an unprecedented opportunity to be healthy. The availability of legal and illegal drugs plus fast and processed food has largly voided this opportunity. For some there is longevity – a descent into joint pain and senility.
Mallacoota is a refuge that despite the unconsciousness of many of it’s, denezines still allows for living with some sort of integrity and purpose.

Back in Melbourne.  My frail 91 years elapsed Mum to fit into the Protea Retirement Village. A giant motel full of people steering walkers around the concrete paths. Greeting each other with disquasitions on their ailments or unsatisfactory offspring.  All of them monuments to modern medicine. 
I was talking to Mum and her father drifted into the conversation. He was a non-commisioned officer in the Royal Artilery stationed for eight years in India. Lost his leg in a parade ground accident where he was run over by a gun carriage. Bad doctoring precipitrated gangrene. Invalided home to England and while on recuperation leave met my Grand Mother whose parents owned a pub. He must have thought he had died and gone to heaven.
From gangrenous amputations to multiple cardiac bypass operations and arifical joints in only a bit over 100 years.
It is curious. When I wander around home I am always surrounded by and aware of kids of all ages every where. They chat with you and each other. They zoom around on there skate boards. I was out and about with Mum around Cranbourne abd Carrum Downs and I saw only a handfull of people under 16. Everyone was fat and old.

There doesn’t seem to be a time in my memory when I didn’t know Jo. I can’t remember when we first met. It was probably at Frank Trayners over a communal bottle of scotch or flagon of claret and a joint.  We became close friends through our association with Margaret Lassica’s Modern Dance Ensemble in the 70,s. She was very much a fixture keen on the lots of thin pretty girls there and of course Margaret and her wonderful mind.  I was there hanging lights and Jo was hanging around with Silvia. She got interested in theatre tech and we became partners in crime. Our social orbits were different she was very much the St Kilda scene and I was Carlton, then Fitzroy and Collingwood.  We gave each other jobs in the biz. She moved more into management while I tended to make and hang up things.

 

We were both driven. We both had things to prove to ourselves and the rest of the world.

 

Later she moved to Preston and I moved to Coburg then ‘Coota.  She came and worked with me on the Mallacoota Festivals trying to realize Woodie’s dreams.  She bought land here and then built her shack that grew and grew and finally moved here.  She had almost finished it when she died.  She loved the building of it.  Seeing her ideas take shape around her was very bright pleasure for her.  For some reason she loved having tradesmen around and they just about all became her friends
Jo was not an easy or comfortable close friend. We were always striking sparks. She was a great one for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and beating you with it. Sometimes I thought she didn’t like me at all.
Jo was fiercely loyal.  When the chips were down she was always there to knock you back into shape with her acerbic common sense. She applied her common sense  to her friends lives much more successfully than to her own.
She collected stray cats and people the latter always seemed to let her down. When she gave her heart it was total. If she thought you had let her down – run for cover.  Her friends found this confusing, as she could never seem to articulate her feelings about what exactly you had done.
Over the fortyish years I have known Jo we have both changed a great deal and stayed the same.
We both loved border collies from childhood. Once we both often viewed the dawn through the bottom of a glass. Our personal lives have been fraught and weird. In many ways Jo and I have been more like family than friends. We could drift in and out of each other’s lives, picking up where we has left off, sharing, feuding and hanging out. After I moved to ‘Coota and before she did, I often stayed at her place in Preston. I would cook curry. I remember one night coming back from a gig at Dance House and turning on the TV and seeing the direct feed from NY with the smoking ruins of The World Trade Centre and thinking it was B grade disaster movie.

 

I remember Jo and Gem and the love. I remember the inexplicable cats. I remember how much she cared and understood about art. I remember her innate bullshit detector that worked on everything but lovers. I remember the often thwarted idealism that refused to give up. Under life’s relentless impositions there was still the sixties dream – that maybe we could make the world a better place.  A hope that sometimes made her impatient and angry with the world.
I do not make close friends easily, my world is a lot colder and lonelier place without Jo in it.

It is clear that what is required to meet the stated needs of the proponents of a new boatramp at Bastion Point is a cheap low impact facility. The insistence on an extensive expensive high impact development by some parties leads to the inescapable conclusion that there are unstated agendas in place. History tells us that these agendas are almost certainly revolving around the attempts of a minority to aquire disproportionate wealth at the expense of the general public good. The majority of the proponents of the large development are unintelligent people with a poor educational background. The minority of the proponents are intelligent aspirational and ethically dubious. The job of the opposition is to find out what this minority know and deal with those issues.
Recent protest activity has got hopelessly derailed by confused motivation. There has been a rising nostalgic groundswell to try and recreate the ‘festival feeling’. This is partly the rose colored glasses of time distorted memory and partly a desire of certain individuals to pursue personal agendas using community resources.
The recent Easter activities while being sucessful in a minor way neither achieved high standard artistic outcomes or effective protest.  They did achieve a ‘feel good’ response from the participants which is ok as far as it went but not a sufficient reason for the huge workload. Short timelines and the choice of a news heavy period both conspired against the project.
Hopefully the video project of creating an entetainment element to the protest will broaden the fanbase of the movement that allied with some investigative journalism surrounding undeclared agendas and procedural malpractise may create some traction.

Jo is at least not suffering anymore. Tho’ the world seems a very different place.  Finn is back from being part of the medical team  which is good.
I have to say that the big plus for the weekend was Momatoto. Who have an amazingly powerful rich sound. They are also delightful people. They were so generous with their time singing at The Market , SBP and last nights concert.
It will be great to get them back after they come back from the US of A.
I am also looking forward to making the video planned for A SBP You Tube campaign.  Making videos is one of my favorite things. It is one of the few things, like writing, where we can make things come out right. 
It is a great change from the community stuff where you are always pussy footing around or being frustrated by peoples self esteem issues in order to get to the core.
Jo’s over-riding emotion was anger and disappointment. I have similar tendency. I have received a heads- up to get over it and get on with it. Thanks Jo.