South for the Winter Part 1: The Voyage

The following is the beginnings of a new project I am working on – a kind of travel journal I am keeping during my winter holiday in Tasmania, which I will write as I go then edit and collate when I am finished. Here is a preview of the first entry:

2nd July: The Voyage

Little birds fly south for the winter. I learnt that many years ago in a book of Sesame Street jokes and riddles. The joke ran:

Question: Why does Little Bird fly south for the winter?

Answer: Because it’s too far to walk.

That fact and its related joke have both stayed in my mind for the decades since I first read the book, even though I have since learnt that a) it clearly applies to more types of birds than just little ones and b) it almost certainly does not apply to birds in the southern hemisphere. Why b)? Because what the joke failed to teach my six or seven-year-old self is that, if birds fly south for the winter, it is in order to escape the winter cold, not – as they would be doing if they flew south in Australia – delving further into it.

And yet here I am defying all the southern hemisphere’s common sense, leaving wintry Melbourne for even more wintry Tasmania. The mind boggles – or should boggle. I, of course, know why I have chosen to do this, even if at times the decision baffles even me. There are several good reasons for what I have chosen to do: I have friends to visit; my flatmate is away for a month and I don’t want to spend my school holidays at home by myself; and last, and perhaps most importantly, if I am going to experience a cold and depressing winter I may as well do it properly.

Besides, there is something exciting, adventurous even, about approaching a Tasmanian winter, in that way we can have of feeling the thrill in doing something that we know to be foolish, challenging, perhaps even downright stupid, yet are choosing to do so, just for the heck of it.

To add a little to the sense of adventure, I am taking the boat. If the boat is in fact, as a friend described it, a large, “floating casino”, it only slightly reduces the sense of adventure, primarily because, putting aside whatever excitement the boat itself may or may not hold, it is also a means to an end: taking the boat means taking my car, and taking my car means that, when the boat arrives in Devonport tomorrow morning at 6:30, I will set off from the north of the island to the south, just me and the road.

Having my car will also mean the freedom to go exploring from my base at Carlton Beach, half an hour from Hobart. While driving around Tasmania in my 1992 Toyota Corolla will not exactly be Roald Amundsen or Abel Tasman material, it will still be the first time I have ventured around the island since I came here with my parents and brother at age ten, and this makes it something of an adventure for me at the very least. The island is small and I have a week to move around in it and see as much as I can. I have all manner of hopes and plans – going as far south as road will take me, for instance, or setting off into the bush of the southwest. What I will actually do and see remains to be determined. But I am entering the experience with a sense of excited anticipation that is not yet dampened by the realities of the Spirit of Tasmania.

There are, however, several realities which the intrepid adventurer will have to face between arriving at the pier and embarking the boat which is primarily a giant garage doubling as a reasonably tacky floating resort. The process of boarding the boat in your car is a lengthy one and a slow one, drawing into its slow upwards chug a range of emotions spanning the thrill of watching the Port Melbourne waves lap around you and then staring upwards at the giant gangway which is your plank onto the boat, through to the letdown of entering the boat’s seventh floor which boasts two restaurants, a café, a shop, a tourism centre and a gambling venue entitled the “Star Club”. It also has a cinema which, at 8pm, will screen “The Muppets Movie” for free. This may or may not be a bonus.

The restaurants do a natural enough job of sending passengers off into their different classes. There is the à la carte restaurant with waiter service to which, I presume, only the more sophisticated passengers will go (I don’t know for sure; I already pre-determined it was not for me), and then there is the “Captain’s Table”, a fairly inappropriately named all-you-can-eat bistro of sorts where you can pay $30 for a “large” plate of food, a dessert and a soft drink. The queue moves a little faster than the gangway onto the boat but only slightly, and standing in it is a curious experience of sharing a dining room and kitchen with a mass of complete strangers from all walks of life, all the while trying to avoid scrutinising their movements (why doesn’t the woman in front of me collect her tray and cutlery at the start?; why does the woman behind me give her  nearly teenage children small plates when it costs the same for children to have small or large?), all the while finding it fascinating to observe something which normally only the super-market checkout brings you even close to observing. And then there is the feeling of being scrutinised yourself, of wanting to take full advantage of what extortionate prices can allow you to have while not appearing to be overloading the plate or taking the best parts of the roast lamb.

And then you eat, the boat starting to move during your first few mouthfuls, giving you the curious sensation while you eat of having the floor moving backwards with you. You probably will not spend too long over your meal – there are people all around you looking for tables and the ambience is hardly something you will want to soak up. So perhaps you will move on to the Lavender Café, where you can buy tea, coffee or alcoholic drinks and sit where you can hear the pokies in the background and the man with the whisky whose iPad is not working perfectly enough for him to be able to savour the fairly miraculous fact that he can be using the internet from the middle of Bass Strait and thus punctuates his failed attempts at whatever he is trying to do with four-letter-word-peppered accusations at the unsuspecting touch screen. These are your travelling companions.

To look at it all objectively, the seats are comfortable, the room is warm, and you are on your way to Tasmania with your car kept somewhere safely beneath the deck. This should really be enough. If the whole experience gives you the impression that the “spirit of Tasmania” smells of cigarettes and whisky and has a soundtrack composed by a pokies machine replete with bleeps and Nintendo-like gurgles, then remember this: tomorrow you will set off onto the Tasman Highway in your own car, and the glorious east of Australia’s magnificent and tranquil southern isle will await. And if the sound of the pokies is a bit too grating and the TV keeps you from focusing on the copy of Nicholas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania that you have taken with you, then it might be worth putting the book away and taking a walk on the deck in the bracing night air and start to feel just that little bit closer to the spirit of Tasmania as it might have seemed to Abel Tasman.

Coming of the Light (The First Missionaries to the Torres Strait, 1871)

Christianity impacted profoundly upon traditional religious and political structures, although Islanders today see it as a fulfilment of the traditional belief system rather than a complete break with the past, as they were previously encouraged to do.
(Anna Shnukal, “Torres Strait Islanders”, Multicultural Queensland 2001)
You me Torres Strait Islander people, you me a light of the world.
(Torres Strait Islander Bishop, “Coming of the Light”, SBS)
Defying, perhaps, what we would expect to see:
A festival of colour and vibrancy and light,
Some vestiges, maybe, of colonial days
(A British Bishop’s mitre, for instance, and crook
Leading the charge through the palm trees and sun),
And yet all caught up in the brightness of day,
Songs are sung and meals are cooked, jokes are cracked,
A Bible waves proudly its pages in the wind
Singing loudly that light shineth in the darkness
And the darkness comprehended it not;
Though briefly stern in the looks on their faces,
They quickly return to radiate light:
Floating waves of music, the flowers that deck hair,
In the background the preacher declaring words of peace,
While seas of coconut wash clean through hands –
A day that onlookers can only guess at,
With wise commentators who theorise and pass
Swift waves of assumption across the islands;
And scholars declare what is true and what false,
Who colonised this and who oppressed that,
And the darkness looks with them confusedly on,
Failing to grasp what all gathered here grasp:
That light shone in darkness and darkness has gone,
And all joy and song have been liberated
In the coming and dancing and singing of light.

De Profundis (Psalm 130)

Out of the depths, I cry and I sweat.
Wasting and waning, I call out to you,
For I believe there may still be hope yet.
“The Lord,” I say, “is my portion”, and yet
Weighty with sin I cannot stand before you –
Out of the depths, I cry and I sweat.
From murky depths, this muffled cry: Let
Your ears hear me, Lord. What else can I do?
(For, I believe, there may still be hope yet…)
With you, they say there’s forgiveness, it’s true,
And so – I fear, and I quake for hope yet…
Out of the depths, I cry and sweat.
I have heard it said you pardon all who repent,
All who cry humbly and wait upon you.
So out of the depths, I cry and I sweat,
For yes, I believe there may still be hope yet.

The Priest Who Chuckled in Poetry

This week, Melbourne priest, poet and teacher Father Peter Steele SJ passed away, at age 72, from cancer. Peter taught me poetry in my final year of Literature at the University of Melbourne, and had such a significant influence on me that I have had to write something in honour of him here. Click on the link below to download my essay as a PDF.

The Priest Who Chuckled in Poetry

Sestina

Silent as winter the sleepy child plays
With teardrops and glistening, hopeful rainbows,
A smile and a whimper, singing for sleep,
Slowly enticing the fullness of dreams,
The light of the daytime long, long away,
The darkness of bedrooms a sweeping blanket.
 
Half-hiding, half-swimming within the blanket,
The happiest, loneliest of children plays,
Diving in oceans, floating, flying away.
He lifts up his pillow to look for rainbows,
And finding none settles for silence and dreams,
The tranquil adventurer’s resting place: sleep.
 
And yet sometimes, a lost explorer, Friend Sleep
Goes missing in jungles beyond the blanket,
Evading the meeting-place of their bright dreams.
Stood up once too often, the waking child plays
And prays in the soil behind the rainbows,
The sunlight of dreamscapes nighttimes away.
 
And singing and dancing and crying away,
The child, an old man, wrestles with sleep.
Confused by the hints and myths of rainbows,
He looks through the sky and finds a blanket;
Holding to mountains and cliff-faces, plays
And prays in the echoes of faraway dreams.
 
The fading and echoing folksong of dreams
Promises heaven just inches away,
So biding time, inching to sleep, the child plays,
Then falling in wakefulness, yells out to sleep,
A torrent of shouting; the sea of the blanket
Ripples with shock, shatters mirrored rainbows.
 
Can he be told, he’s not lost the rainbows?
They’re hiding in safety within heaven’s dreams.
Obscured by wakefulness, an opaque blanket,
He can’t hear their echoes, hoping away,
And so sinks from playing, so sinks in sleep,
Midnight forgetting the games that he plays.
 
The hope of the morning just rainbows away,
He dreams at last, clutching the last drift of sleep,
And floating upon his blanket-raft, plays.

Rondeau

When I am set free I’ll be
A marvellous, bright thing to see,
A humbled crown of godly pride,
A rosy thorn within the side
Of all I used to be;
 
I will shine there such glory
I could not create if I tried.
Christ will glow and glow inside,
When I am set free.
 
So will the angels think of me
When they have Christ’s face to see?
We’ll all fall in vanquished pride,
Before the conqueror who died
And now, alive, will ever be,
When we are set free.

Pillars, Rocks and Scales (For Peter and Paul, Apostles and Martyrs)

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. (1 Peter 4:12)
I.
Readily he left his nets,
Left the boat to walk upon
The water just as Jesus did,
Only then to sink within
The waves, then be pulled out by hand,
Sternly; ye of little faith…
Always that tension raging:
The will to walk out on the sea,
Never leave, never forsake,
(Cut the high priest’s servant’s ear);
And then the will to run and hide,
To warm by fires and deny.
And yet this truth: that when old, though
Headstrong, he would be taken
Where he did not want to go,
Dressed in clothes he did not choose,
Hanging upside down upon
His master’s accursed tree.
May I, though just as faithless,
Bear to stand out in the cold;
May I, though sinking, stand here firm.
Though also petrified, may I
Think it joy to bear that tree,
And in this joy become as rock.
II.
Damascus-bound and zealous,
The fiery one who stood and watched
And held the coats while Stephen sang;
Orders in his hand to kill,
The self-sure orders of the proud,
The righteous one in his own eyes.
As for zeal, persecutions;
As for righteousness, perfect;
That inner voice always assures the self.
And then, upon Damascus Road,
A blinding light, a voice calling.
Saul, Saul, I am Jesus
Whom you persecute. How long
Will you kick against the goads?
Why do you kick them, Saul?
A silent scream, an inner kneel;
A needy, blind walk towards
The house on Straight Street to gain eyes;
And then – a hesitating step,
A faith-step in, a loss of face,
To stand inside the house of foes,
To stand and wait on mercy.
After that: the fall; the dropping of
The scales with the drooping of knees,
And in Ananias’ inner ear,
The voice he heard that told him of
An enemy now become a friend
And how much he would learn and how
Much he would suffer for the
Name which had now called him inside.
III.
Beneath these pillars I fall down,
Scarcely bending my proud knees:
The rock which spoke of living stones
And corner-stones for stumbling,
And the worst of sinners who
Puts my best attempts to shame.
And joy evades on peaceful days
While Peter, upside-down in death,
And praising and imprisoned Paul
Sing their songs of hope while I
Drop below the waves and cry at
Foolishness and cross-stirred joy.
Yet in this truth I am held firm:
That rocks are made from trembling knees,
And even the most hardened eyes
(Ossified and petrified)
Can be shown again the light
As scales fall off and rocks rise up.

Beggar’s Yelp

Son of David, I
have nothing but my filthy rags
 
and my wounds, my static place
beside this wall, my
 
cracked and open hands, the dirt
upon my swollen skin, the cracks
 
in my voice as I cry
out to You; my beggar’s yelp.
 
Your crown is hidden,
yet I see
 
You for who You really are,
and You, for better
 
or for worse, seem to see
and hear me.
 
Son of David, do not – please –
leave me sitting begging here;
 
I will cry, and I will beg;
there is nothing else for me.

Gnosis (For Irenaeus of Lyon)

Against the stormy sea of gnosis
(rising, so transcendently,
on waves that lifted high above
the flesh, the concrete, physical!),
while wandering philosophers
preached gnosis all throughout his see,
sweeping all their hearers up
in currents of their eloquence,
a Bishop stood and bucked the tide,
and lifting up a bulwark to
hold against the heresies,
he shouted out in hyperbole
so he could be heard above
the sirens and the breakers’ roar,
then, as the sailors paused to hear
the fervour of his warning cry,
he dropped his voice down to a whisper,
letting it be overwhelmed
by the steady fog-horn from
the light-house of the word of life,
a beacon in that sea of gnosis
shining to the concrete Truth.

The One True Image (For Cyril of Alexandria)

If any one confess not, that the Word of God the Father hath been personally united to Flesh, and that He is One Christ with His own Flesh, the Same (that is) God alike and man, be he anathema.
(Cyril of Alexandria, Adversus Nestorii Blasphemias)
Icon contained in an icon, he holds
A picture of the Virgin and Child
Beside his chin as if to show
A symbol of his pride and joy;
And then in his lowered left hand,
He holds an open, unfolding scroll,
The words of truth spilling out,
An open truth for open ears.
And Nestor falls behind the screen,
The Bishop whose hands could not hold
The equal truths of God and Man, who
Holding one, would drop the other,
Letting go of God-made-man,
And taking in its place a God
Merely clad in human clothes,
Without mother, without real flesh.
Yet Cyril holds the picture to
Guide our eyes back to the truth,
Though human eyes cannot quite see
And human minds not comprehend:
Hold it! he cries, though heavy and
Confusing. Do not let it fall
From your weak, appeasing grip.
And then that stern, repeating cry,
Be he anathema! – cried to those
Who look away and do not see
That God, in whose great image we
Are made (though far and farther from
Who we should be), became a man,
And with his new transfigured flesh
We too might be transfigured so
That mortal temples might have life.
The icon stands, imperfect and
A slight distraction from the truth.
Yet in the sternness of his eyes,
We see what Cyril longs to say,
That broken images can be remade,
That Word-made-flesh can turn our flesh,
As soiled and torn as it is,
Back to the true image of God.