Tim Winton and the occupation of the ratepayer

Reflecting on Tim Winton's understanding of how children can find themselves living in "occupied territory", and what they must do to survive...

In today's Sydney Morning Herald ("It's a risky business", 24 April 2008):

So what is it about risk? Winton reckons it's so prevalent among the young because Western culture has such safety and domesticity. "You can understand a residual appetite for wildness," he says. "But I think there's also a physical, psychological and erotic correlative to all that."

He knows all about it. He had that hunger for wildness that he gives the boys. When he was still quite young he moved from the Perth suburbs to Albany with his parents. "Growing up in a small country town, there was this palpable compulsion towards risk and that had to do with somehow defeating the empire of boredom and the empire of domesticity and the empire of the occupation ... youth often feel they're living under occupation; the occupation of the old and the occupation of the ratepayer.

"From that occupied territory, we'd go out on these pointlessly insurgent actions of risk-taking which simply involved fast cars, drugs, sexual misadventure and, where we were, firearms. And, for my tiny coterie of fellow travellers, water sports."

(The SMH article is in relation to Tim Winton's new novel, Breath.)

Staemmler's 2nd scheme of interaction

This is an initial attempt to animate Staemmler's second scheme of interaction between the partners in a couple.


I've shown the shapes shifting because that is what happens in the interactions between the partners - behaviours, and the meanings attributed to them by the other party, are in constant flux; and in constant reaction to a wide range of factors in the field* (cultural and gender to name just two), both in and out of awareness.

Frank Staemmler's schemes of interaction are in his paper Joint Constructions: On the Subject Matter of Gestalt Couple Therapy, Exemplified by Gender-Specific Misunderstandings with Regards to Intimacy, in Robert Lee's recent book The Secret Language of Intimacy.

field: "complex interaction of all effects for a given person". For more on the Gestalt field, see here and my own paper here (PDF).

The monaro, drought 2006

Recently, some photos I took in the Monaro region of NSW in 2006 have been coming back to me - I suppose because the header image in this new blog has an image I also took in the Monaro.

The drought was 10 years old in 2006. Here are some images:



My poem seven crows was influenced by driving around Monaro dirt roads at that time, to take photos, as were some small paintings.

seven crows

seven crows inhabiting the night
seek the taste of black meat

harry the river of indifference
that flows like cold lava from the south

with the crows

from the bleached stalks and dry lands
to gloat

having driven the inhabitants
who were once keen farmers

to muttering

shamed
that others may look at their blighted lands
and see their state of reduction

crying
do you want this bloody land
you can buy it from me

To finish, Judith Wright's poem The Cicadas starts out:

On yellow days in summer when the earth
presses like hands hardening the sown earth
into stillness, when after sunrise birds fall quiet
and streams sink in their beds and in silence meet...

Two poetic openings - Wright and Levertov

On the recent theme of openings, here are two wonderful poems. To me, both speak of the possibilities of opening ourselves to deeper, richer parts of ourselves, through encounters with the natural world.

The first is by Judith Wright:

Breath

I turned to the dark window;
outside were stars and frost.
My breath went out to the night,
shaped like a cloud or a mist.
Small and soulless ghost,
what was it my heart meant
that, watching the way you went,
it moved so under my breast?

And here is Denise Levertov's A Reward. This is a beautiful poem that was originally in her collection Evening Train.

A Reward

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall — the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

A Reward can now be found in Denise Levertov's New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Robert Lee's new book

Robert Lee was recently in Sydney and it was a pleasure to meet up with him again at the GANZ Professional Development Evening. And it was an opportunity to buy from this gentle man his new book The Secret Language of Intimacy (The GestaltPress, 2008), which continues his investigation into the dynamics of couple relationships.

As well as Robert's work and his description of how he runs his intimacy workshops, I was very taken by Frank M Staemmler's paper, in this book, on joint constructions and gender-specific misunderstandings. I'd like sometime to try to animate some of his constructions on this blog.

Another opening - "to the studios"

In a previous post I remarked on the experience of approaching a grassy rise at Mystery Bay. There was a sense of opening to the sky and the scape, and a great sense of hope.

I get a similar feeling from this wonderful work by Frank Auerbach in the current show at Rex Irwin gallery - Important drawings, prints and ceramics.

Frank Auerbach
Sketch; To the studios 1977
Ink on paper, 29.5 x 34.3cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)

For me, Auerbach has captured the sense of hope and opening of a artist approaching his places of creation. And I think this sense can apply to others of us when we approach our places of creativity, whatever they may be. The title has "studios" in the plural and for me this is significant - the creative places in us are plural.

More mystery bay

Gulaga

Descending Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) on the New South Wales far south coast. This was on our February trip to Mystery Bay and around.

Short article on Gulaga.

From my poem blue boat on a stormy sea:

feeling the chill, descended
encountering things of a black shiny nature –

wriggling leaches
that we knocked from our shoes
and a snake that turned its back
slipped away into cover

Mystery bay

In February we spent ten days at Mystery Bay on the New South Wales far south coast. It's a beautiful area and I found writing there very pleasurable. Here's an evening image taken from the cottage we stayed in.

A poem that resulted:

the little ones

a flock of tight knots -
brown gerygones
drubbing on lathes of the decking
like rubber bullets ricocheting

little fists of children

each vector of forces
arriving and then leaving
the verandah empty

not as it was
before they came
but changed, a stage

whereon the piece took place
and the little ones
moved on

And I find the image below a very hopeful one - approaching a rise on an open track, a soulful lifting and sense of space. The black cockatoos love this area, swaying in the banksias and strafing in flocks. Near the headland north of Mystery Bay, on the way to Corunna Lake.

Recent purchase

We recently purchased this great work by Euan Macleod.

Euan Macleod
Bird figure 2007
Acrylic on paper, 76 x 56cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)

The work was in the exhibition Figure in a Landscape at Rex Irwin gallery.

Here's another great work from the same show:

Peter Booth
Drawing 2007
(Man and trees in snow)
Mixed media on paper, 13 x 27.5 cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)