Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Australian

  • the men who hate women

    Hi Callum! Good morning

    I’d like to ask your advice as I don’t know now what to do with my free trial. Can we suspend it? Can I apply it to a different training group?

    I attended two sessions at the riverside park with Chris. Was super looking forward to it and excited to commit to my fitness and wellbeing. There were incidents in both sessions which made me uncomfortable and Chris’s response has just been ‘good luck finding a new group.’ He hasn’t offered to tackle the issue and when I replied with a summary of what had made me so acutely uncomfortable I actually left early, he didn’t bother to respond at all.

    I wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy. This is a female-based group in which women should be respected. We shouldn’t have to put up with our own trainer warning not to work too hard on our upper body strength because ‘Nobody likes a lady with a thick neck.’ A wave of disturbance ran through the women around me when Chris said that. Women’s bodies are our own. We’re not there for him to rate and deem more or less attractive. Women are entitled to be strong. We can be competent, powerful, fit, and active. If a professional personal trainer can’t uphold this, who will?

    The second session a man standing beside me, huge guy, made an off-colour remark that I found very distressing. Being still out of condition, I lay down a moment on my mat. A woman said, hey, it’s not lying down time yet! And this man with a big smirk remarked, “Darl, it’s not that kind of establishment.”

    Again, a ripple of unrest and disgust through the women present. Women were saying things like, Gross, that’s off, let’s all pretend we didn’t hear that. How disgusting that he feels it’s ok to evoke the spectre of prostitution and ‘establishments’ in which men have to bribe women for sex. How awful that even the trainer won’t speak up! (For comparison, imagine the trainer’s response if a customer made a remark of an equivalent level of racism). Women are used to being sexualised, at every opportunity, from the age of 10 or 11: most of us in this group were in our 40s, 50s and 60s so we have now been putting up with this trash for three or four decades. Why should we have to pretend not to hear sexist, degrading remarks which make women feel unsafe, in a professional training session which should be a safe space? We’re all wearing skin tight lycra and bending over with our butts in the air. It’s so upsetting that even here, your trainers don’t take care to make sure women feel welcomed and safe and respected.

    I’ve told a friends and random women serving in shops etc about this encounter and their response in every single case was the same. Don’t be fooled by the fact that women are conditioned to think it’s pointless to speak out. We hate it.

    Regards,

    Cathoel Jorss

    You might like to pass this on to your trainers to try to wake them up:

    https://houseoflovers.com/literature/street-crimes/

  • stay with me

    Once an Islander man stepped out onto the pavement as I was passing. We both stopped and stood facing one another. My heart was beating very fast. He had intricate ranking tattoos all over his face and his eyes were very dark. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, ‘stay with me for a while.’

  • parcel in cloth

    One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly climbing out, he lifted the man’s parcel wrapped in stained cloth – perhaps his stall – from the front passenger seat and set it down on the pavement. Then the two of them lifted it without a word, one side each, and settled it on the man’s head so he could carry it home.

    I saw a little boy tapping my Ghanaian boyfriend on the hip, offering a coin. “Boss – you dropped this.”

    Sometimes I think about Australian cities where these days people barely say hello. I think about New York, where I first visited in 2011 and New Yorkers were always saying to me, “You Australians are so friendly. In New York we hate each other.” Then I wonder how much of my experience of being in Ghana is filtered through the privilege of being a relatively well-off visitor, a white woman, someone from whom everybody can potentially benefit.

  • heart attacked

    I just got a letter from my mother explaining she has been in hospital for five days with bronchial pneumonia. Mum is in Brisbane and I am in Berlin and no one told me.

    She’s 78 years old and had a hip and a knee replaced this year, since my father’s death. This is the sickest, ie closest to death, she’s ever been. It is hard to be the survivor of a 50-year marriage. People often die on the heels of their spouses.

    A few years back I rang my Dad on his birthday. I sang happy birthday to him over the phone. I was in Adelaide and they were all in Brisbane. He told me they had taken him out for a steak dinner. He described the wine, he loved sparkling shiraz. We chatted for perhaps twenty minutes. Then Dad said, “By the way.”

    Casually. “Your brother’s in hospital, we think he’s having a heart attack.”

    I have the feeling one of these bright days I might get an email. Mum died last Tuesday, she was cremated at Mount Ommaney, it was a lovely ceremony. On our first day back from the family holiday on the Gold Coast I got a phone call from the brother whose own heart would later be attacked, or is it attack him. It was the first day of the year ten years ago. “Dad’s had a stroke. He’s still alive.” My brothers and even their friends had all assembled at the hospital, they’d left it so late in the day to call me I could not get on a flight til the next day. I remind myself very many people have these stories that make painful experiences more painful. This morning my heart aches and I am questioning this old ache. I have the feeling by now I ought to be used to it. I always hope it will let me learn to dance more wisely and the creaks be a species of jazz.

  • The Great Fire

    Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of life; turn her back on the War, which is, as we see, unending – ‘the inextinguishable conflagration’ – and write, at last, ‘Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.’

    Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death; of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration.

    These hours would be lived to the full. Years of hours would follow, but not this. He had felt their chance passing; she too, in fear. For this he had travelled to the airy, empty harbour where, like a legend, she lay in a mildewed swing-seat, waiting. As surely as if she had leapt from a planked deck into the ocean and swum ashore, she had jumped ship for him. Ten thousand miles had been retraced, down to the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name.

    Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.

    ~ Shirley Hazzard.

  • new under the sun

    Walking through the park in the unexpected sunshine yesterday I realised suddenly: strolling through summer in Berlin is like strolling through an off-duty circus. People are riding bicycles with no hands, they are taking turns practising walking slack rope, one man is playing the tuba and another is set up with his slap box between his knees. Two Turkish drug dealers have set up an adorable ‘office’ with a plastic chair, an empty red milk crate on its side standing by the path, and a dull red singlet bag bin hanging from a handy branch. It is so patently an office and the office Open that we both start to laugh. On the rolls of concrete piping downhill people are teaching their dogs new tricks. It’s too cold for barefoot.

    I was writing in a cafe this morning when a joyous gurgle caught my ear and I glanced up. Two men, both burly, both bearded, both wearing baseball caps, were standing one at either end of the long counter laden with cakes, each of them holding up an infant. It was comical to see them so strongly mirroring each other, in their outfits, in their body types, and seemingly unconscious of it. As I watched, the one on the left, who was ordering, held up his baby and made it wave to the other baby at the other end of the counter, waiting. The babies gazed at one another and gurgled. Behind the counter the staff were laughing. This was our third sunny day since October. It’s easy to laugh when the sun is out.

    I was so immersed later that when after a long while my second coffee hadn’t arrived I had to ask myself, did I actually order that? Or did I… just dream it? The recollection had sunk like in water, leaving absolutely no trace. I went on writing. A shadow fell over my page. I could feel all my concentration tightening til he was gone. This is the man, one of two men who come in, visits every week two or three times collecting donations for his wellbeing. This one sells Motz, a street mag for homeless people’s income, and the other sells little slips of paper on which he has written Inspirational Poems of his own. To be interrupted when pen is moving across paper and I have the next five sentences stacked precariously in order on the prong of my thought as I shovel forward diligently – it upsets everything and then all the sparkling world is gone. I have been this way since childhood and no matter how I tried to unlearn it – my mother would say, why can’t you just answer the phone and then go back to your writing? – I can’t. So I was relieved when the guy, to whom I have explained two or three times this need, moved away. But he struck at my heart all the same. He is so unpretending, so humble, so courteous. The next two tables engaged with him but no one would give him any money. This is a hipster cafe, which I choose for its Australian staff and because they play the languid tunes by which concentration is most possible. I am there for hours each week. I thought about how it would feel to come in out of the sunshine on this glorious day, everyone littering the pavement with their expensive prams and their lovely bicycles, and to ask round a place in which people in their new clothes, and Cathoel, are feasting on ten-dollar breakfasts, and to be told: no, I’ve nothing for you, I can’t help you.

    I could, but I won’t.

    It would feel excluding, is how it would feel. And yet he thanked each table of twenty-five-year-olds calmly, wishing each in turn “Schönen Tag noch,” a beautiful rest of the day. At the doorway I caught up with him, where he had paused to talk with the German girl sitting in the window. She was reaching for her purse so I waited out of range, not wanting her to think, oh – that other woman is giving something, I needn’t give him then as much. I put my finger on his sleeve. “Ich wollte Ihnen herzlich danken, dass Sie mich nicht unterbrochen haben. Das ist wirklich lieb von Ihnen.” I wanted to thank you from the heart (Germans say), that you didn’t interrupt me. That was really lovely of you. His face broke into a wizened smile, though he is young. He put a hand on his own heart. “I recognised you – and that you have told me you are working -” I said, “I so appreciate it. You know if the concentration gets shattered, then everything is gone.” He said something I couldn’t understand, maybe that he does know this, he writes, also. Ah, I said: then you know! And we regarded each other with a terrific fleeting fondness. This is possible in Berlin, I find more of it here than I have found anywhere, even on the terrible subways of New York. I gave him some money, not much, about the price of a coffee, and was aware of the self-serving hope that he would take this as confirmation of our agreement rather than incentive to interrupt me the next time. The guy with the poetry is harder to deal with, with his lambent eyes. I cannot bear to be interrupted to read his verses whilst struggling to write poetry of my own.

    I told my companion about this experience, he knows the guys I’m speaking of, and we turned out of the park at the end and came into a thicket of streets which led loopingly round to the big second hand emporium with its American flag changing room curtain. A cardboard cutout stands sentinel in the booth, Second Handy Warhol. It is a relief to need cooler clothes at last. I bought a stiff denim dress which feels like you’re wearing a little sailboat, it stands out like canvas in a gormless triangle and I feel about five years old standing in my bare arms and legs which have been covered since Autumn, I will need to wear several layers underneath this frock until probably June but it yields the promise of Summer to come and the long glorious evenings, the bald European sky.

  • knowing one another in the dark

    Knowing one another in the dark: this is life in the wintertime, in Germany. Three days ago the late summer turning purple in Central Park; tonight the moist grey soft air, the dark day, the lighted bicycles on the path. I have only just realised in Berlin we are on a latitude with Alaska; New York is on a latitude with Spain, a far sunnier prospect.

    It felt strange to me, coming home to a home that is no home at all, where I’ve lived less than three years in total and always in spates, looking over my shoulder to the next project which had to be done in Copenhagen or in Madrid, or back in Brisbane. My father has cancer there and I’m here. My nephews are growing up there and I’m here. My cat lives over there and I’m here. For a cat who spends her afternoons tormenting tiny tropical lizards and basking in the endless pouring caramel sun, I remind myself: relocation to an indoor apartment life in northern Europe would be cruel. But she’s so soft and we used to sleep tucked into one another. When I was ill and alone once and could not very often struggle out of bed, this cat licked me, with great earnestness and a harsh tongue, all over, like a giant kitten until to her satisfaction I was clean. She is a wonderful companion but a horrible correspondent. I mourn about it over the phone to my mother in Brisbane, to make her laugh: all these months and not one phone call… Not a postcard… “She is scuffling at the receiver,” my mother says, and I hear soft scratching sounds. “She hears your voice.”

    At JFK airport everybody was white. Everyone except the wait staff, the security personnel, the cleaners and the guy emptying the trash. At the security gate he lifted a large plastic bag of plastic bottles of water from the bin and carried it away: I watched the glinting light that is really a terrifying form of the endless dark that will take us all underwater sift through all that plastic and bobbling trucked water and thought, America… it’s be part of the solution, not part of the dissolution. We ate a meal and the waitress brought us so many paper napkins my knife and fork fell off the top of the pile. Wait, she hadn’t brought a second set of – yes, she had. A second tower of waste paper stood across the tabletop and this tree graveyard was all for me. They hand you napkins when you order a coffee. They use polystyrene. Let’s not talk about that.

    At length in our airplane by which I am responsible for far more pollution than any squanderer of napkins can ever claim we left the land behind, at Nova Scotia, and began our crossing. The dark Atlantic. Thickened up with polystyrene chunks that never break down, only into smaller chunks of polystyrene foam. And roofed, increasingly, with a dully cluttered sea foam of plastic bottles, mostly the bottles in which Americans have bought water.

    Germans buy water too. Recycling the bottles is only a partial improvement. We landed at Tegel, the gloriously Soviet styled airport which was actually part of West Berlin. Germans streamed past with their big square heads looking serious yet warm. They recycle. They carry their empty bottles back to the place they were purchased and retrieve tiny amounts of loose change. There are no returned soldiers sleeping on subway platforms. Instead, in Berlin there is a Coldness Bus that travels round on frigid nights collecting homeless people who might otherwise perish in their sleep. There is something here to learn, for you, America, I think, and also for us, Australia, where we lock up desperate families behind razor wire and have turned landfill production into a sport. The clouds of pollution and damage are closing around us and we need to learn to know each other in the dark.

     

  • her blonde fall

    Today I pulled my ugg boots out of the back of the closet and yanked them on to walk down to the nearest coffee shop. Under the lowered sky the world feels more like a cave than a palace of splendours. It is cold and what withers my heart is that it will now stay cold here for months. Flowers are still standing on people’s balconies but the sky behind the buildings has soured. My little blue mug marches with me every morning past the Turkish men playing backgammon and the local alcoholics gathering outside the convenience store to drink beer. The prospect of seeing no blue sky nor hearing birdsong til May or even June is so terribly daunting to a tropical heart. It is cold and dim and it’s going to get colder and darker; the ground will freeze solid; the rivers will freeze over; it is going to be cold and dark, always cold, colder and darker and dimmer til Spring.

    The little cafe is brimming with people and music. I used to come in and write here, every day, back in 2012; that was six or seven sublets ago. I am aware as I move out of the way a third time, waiting for the Australian barista to pour, that my order, in Melbourne barista-speak, is a suburban why bother. A cafe owner in Northcote once translated the name to my face, jauntily, making rapid notes, then looked up and saw my eyes had filled with tears of mortification and exclusion. Poor guy. He spent the rest of the morning hustling my friend and me to ever choicer patches of dappled sun and offering us sample cakes and sandwiches. It’s just convenient, he lied, in a fluster. Extra hot is suburban. Decaf is why bother. In a culture which preens itself on hardiness and how many coffees everybody ‘needs’ to get through their demanding day, to drink caffeine free with a scalded milk froth is like walking unemployed into a cocktail party of the leisured, mannered, drunken wealthy and asking for a glass of milk.

    I’ve done that too.

    As the sky closes over our heads we turn within, I guess, a more meditative season. My heart aches after the email from my father today about the cosy family holiday they had, a farmstay with all the little children: like the childhoods we had, on our grandparents’ farm, a place now sold and probably built out. I’m in exile and I can’t go back. But as the natural landscape pleaches us in with its monotones of winter sleep, maybe that of the humans around me will brighten and deepen and welcome me in. The golden daytime candles are sat out on cafe tables already. The smooth endless music rolls forth. There’s the wintry rattle of cars over stones. The changing colours on the market, from bright summer fruits to rich, bruising plums and sprays of spinach, and beets. Two or three weeks ago we cycled miles out of town to a garden party, livid with lanterns. We swam in two lakes and ate breads and preserves our hosts had made, and felt sleepy at table. A large dog thumped her tail under the bench seat. At 2 o’clock in the morning on the quiet train home I lay huddled against the glass divider, replete. A woman got on and plumped herself against the opposite side of the glass. She dropped her head back and sighed. She had a glorious fall of long blonde hair, different colours of blonde, salon tipped, which flattened out against the glass as she took out her phone, compressing like a river of gemstones into one two-dimensional clotted sky after another as she turned her head. I lay sleepy with my face pressed into her hair, but for the glass, and I now recall it: and winter stings me, but there’s always the heaven of us.

  • forever leaving home

    So on December 4th I stripped myself out of the hammock tied under a tree that is no longer there, and put on a Santa suit and biker boots, and we went out to the airport in Brisbane and got on a plane. We left summer and got here to Berlin in winter, it never grew light and it never grew dark. Having parked my tiny cat with my parents we went into West Germany by train to pick up his dog from his. Dog was hysterical. Family were loud. A New Year ensued and we came back to Berlin to begin 2015, moving both into his one-room studio apartment, with the dog, until a bare four weeks later a sensational four a.m. barney – involving all three of us – saw me move into an elderly pension over in another, more genteel part of town, and stay away.

    I lived in that desiccated hotel for three months. After a month they gave me a kettle and a mug so that I could make cups of tea in my room. The room I’d started out in is their biggest and grandest and has a great desk, so it’s popular – we made a cosy arrangement where I could stay at a reduced rate but had to move rooms every time they had a new booking. I could hear the conversations at the front desk and the sense of stringently absent privacy was wearing, after a while.

    Meanwhile outside my window on the golden street with its slicked-umbrella trees the winter melted into Spring. I went to Spain and came back to find all the street had bloomed, you could walk very slowly from one end to the other between one glossy scintillating treespan and the next; under one, one day, a man huddled by his shopping cart of rescued bottles was sleeping, on another bench a young man rocked his bored child back and forth, staring intently past the trees and the spattered sunlight into the embrace of his gleaming dark phone. I felt I was always alone there. I sank into myself, in the old town, in Europe, and Germany.

    We went again to Spain, this time I took my beloved, with whom things were better the moment we stopped trying so hard to share the one long desk, the one room, the one window. Madrid became my favourite place, I felt childhood reawaken in me like a scent, like palm trees and cinnamon, and when it came time to leave I was sad and did not want to face Berlin at all. It feels like we’ve been away for months. It is three weeks I think. We went back down to the small town to fetch the hysteric dog and then at last yesterday, late in the evening, I met the woman who had advertised a large white apartment for sublet and I gave her some money and she gave me some keys, and I loaded all my suitcases thankfully, exhaustedly into the back of a cab and woke up here this morning, all alone, alone in Germany, not far from my sweetheart and his morning walk and for the first time in six months – to the day – I have my own place, my own home, a place I can write in and read when I want and where no one engages with me and I need not move, if I can gather the money to stay on and if the German government are willing to have me, for as long as I need to… I counted up all the times I’d moved down the hall from one hotel room to another and the travelling we had both done since we left our little cottage in the middle of screeching Brisbane, where I barely left home at all, and after I got to thirty removals I gave up the count, and I hope to resume it again only after some long, restful interval has passed, and my soul has repaired itself from all the tumult, and I have been blessed with many months of languor and dishevelled, resting solitude, and never packed my case or had to remember my notebook and toothbrush, Australia seems another lifetime and I cannot reach the beaches, the desert, the dense greenery, I am here in this stony iron country with its brass plaques outside the doorways where people were stolen from their everyday lives and its much browner birds and whiter sky, its tyranny.

  • belovedly

    Oh, Germany. Sometimes I am just so grateful to you! I came three years ago, for a week, with a suitcase of summer clothes. Stayed on and stayed. Met a man. Made some friends. Found a Kiez, a barrio, a neighbourhood. Now I am back and the dense sweet piercing chill of this supposedly Spring evening has lifted and carried me when I most needed the lifting, I needed the carry.

    Here’s what happened to me today. I kept running aground. Couldn’t work out why and there were things I was itching to do. Eventually I figured out: it was because I was in pain. This happens irregularly, more often than you’d like. It’s character building. I rang the osteopath, who is in the next street, and she was available within hours. So I just went to bed to wait. Reading my book. Third book this week, not a bad one. I like this osteo and she treats me, after three or four visits, familiarly, friendshippy: Lass dich mal wieder sehen, she sang out a month ago when I last left. Let yourself be seen, come back again. She reminds me of the Melbourne friend of my mother and I thought of her as motherly, underwinging, kind.

    This time seemed to bring earlier events up to a clearer pitch. She wanted me to lie on my back shirtless, was reluctant to hand over a towel. She let her hands dig into my shoulders and then brought her face rather close to mine, breathing deeply in. For long moments we lay and stood like this and naked high in the sky as the blue faded to black I let my mind wash off into its meditative dream: life is deep and long, worlds are a forest, there is nothing I can change here but I bring my attention to bear on this shipwrecked beach, breathing. I surpassed it all with calm. When I got home I felt wrung out and bleakly alone. It is difficult working out how to say in German, you are too near, I want to be covered.

    When I say home, I mean my hotel room. Two months ago my honey and I had a fight, it was 4am and we simply couldn’t bear it any more, and since then I have been living in an hotel and we find ourselves gradually so much more comfy and at ease. The reason for our fight was: two of us, plus one medium-sized dog, living in one room for months on end wore us down. We are both loners and creative types, used to the silence. We tried alternating headphones, I tried writing on the floor of the tiny bathroom and in cafes. It was snowing outside and no one could simply go out for a walk and lose themselves in the greenery. What greenery. Anyway I came home to my hotel, which is quiet and sedate and very old-fashioned; they let me stay here for cheap because they like writers. I was hungry; it was midnight; surely everything would be closed. I wrapped myself again and set out across the square. This bar I like was open, glowing with the hum. Serious German conversation at all tables. The one table in the window, where the cat sleeps, empty for me. I ordered onion soup from the menu open “til one hour early”, which means, til one o’clock in the morning. I ordered a beer. I let the stumbling crank and rumble of benign Germanness wash me all round. I watched the bar cat, sleeping in the hammock of herself. Her name is Zappa. Two gentlemen next to me had the chess board out, but it took them a long while to get down to playing. Something they were discussing took up all of their attention the way a paper towel blots milk. I love listening to German men talking over beers with their friends. There’s so little machismo. Their voices are often deep but they are excited by the ideas, by the shared experience, they converse. The cook, who has biker boots and a long skinny plait, came out carrying my onion soup and a basket of four different kinds of bread. I took my book out and just stared at it. The words printed on the pages were stars and I let them carry me, they were carpets, dancing on the orange horizon where one never meets oneself, where everything is wild, where languages are ribbons not unlike long-eared underwater plants writhing in the salt and combing themselves back and back and back, illustrious, clean. I sat there until the detritus of my day had sanded out of my bathers and then the warm oil of it lit me all the way home and I will carry this into my sleep, a moreish story.