Author: Christine Eyres

Winter in Manjimup. I asked for it. As to be expected, it is fff-freezing. Meagre warmth from the sun earlier, has now dissipated into the clear ether, leaving me huddling inside my tiny van, swaddled in layers of clothing and fur-lined boots. I can’t complain, the weather enabled me to set up my camp without a drenching, and it was my choice not to go for a walk around the town. However, I feel justified in my slackness after driving most of the day.

Not surprisingly I am almost alone in the campsite. Who else wants to come south and camp at this time of year? The alternative, warmer accommodation I tried to find is apparently all booked out, needed to house the workers who are establishing a lithium mine in Greenbushes.

Lithium is what we need to help technology for green energy. And at the moment, I am ignorant of the process of digging it up but somehow, it feels like a sick joke that we have to mine the stuff from the middle of our precious native forests.

So tonight, after some pea and ham soup, heated up in my little air-fryer (the best invention) and a couple of glasses of red, I’m off to bed with Michael Christie. I hope he doesn’t keep me up too late with his novel ‘Greenwood’. Tomorrow I’m off to explore the old growth forests if I can find any still standing.

My character’s mind keeps returning to her mother, Nancy.

Nancy came from the north west of Scotland near the beautiful village of Achitilbuei where her family had owned a croft on a green hill bordered by the sea. The Summer Isles shone jewel-like in the bay. Beyond, on a clear day, the Hebrides showed themselves, grey and mysterious. She went back to Achitilbuei after the death of her mother. It was summer when the light refused to die. It transformed, enchanted, coloured the croft and the sea and the islands until she felt close to drowning in its beauty and her grief. Now, regret overwhelms her. She could have returned years earlier with her mother, perhaps after Granny had died. They could have shared so much.

 

Granny had come out to Australia and lived with them for a while. She was part of the furniture sitting by the fire, humming Gaelic songs to the click clack of her knitting, needles. Knitting, knitting, always knitting. A jolly old lady with a wicked laugh, she’d tell Nedra stories from the islands while they sat and shelled peas or peeled potatoes. The stories were full of kidnappings and killings and ships going down with sailors drowning. She can still see her frowning mother shaking her head, saying: ‘That’s no’ a tale to be telling a wee lassie, Mother.’

Sitting on my sofa with my laptop on my knee, I find myself stuck. 42 000 words into the first draft of the story, I am grounded. The weather is conspiring against going to the beach and walking my way out of my stranded situation, causing the dog to harrumph in a sulk. I find myself staring at the painting in front of me, a portrait of my father that I entitled, Accordion Man. I wonder why I never succeeded in painting a portrait of my mother. I was never satisfied with the attempts I made. Last week, while writing, I realized that, once again, the mother/daughter relationship had crept into my work.

The room is silent except for the old dog now quietly snoring beside me on the sofa. My eyes wander, and then rest on Clyde Woman that I painted as an imagined portrait of the great grandmother I never knew–Agnes the central character in my first book. For the first time, it now strikes me with certainty that this painting is actually a portrait of Mary, my mother. Behind the figure is the Cloche Lighthouse at the mouth of the Clyde River in Scotland. It is the place we lived at the time of my birth. She wears a white apron and holds a fish in her arms, a grim set to her face. The grimness is understandable when you know many of the circumstances of her young life. The white apron, she would not physically have worn in my lifetime, even though such a garment could still be found in readiness behind the front doors of tenements in Scotland until the 1960’s. By that date Mary was settled in Australia. However, this garment, a mantle of respectability, a resistance against the judgment of the Victorian era that maintained the poor were responsible for the condition they found themselves in, I believe was handed down through the generations to be mentally worn by my mother during my childhood and perhaps beyond.

The fish, although held firmly by her hands, still controlled her. It is the Christian fish of her protestant upbringing, that when she married my strongly socialist, atheist father, she tried to let go but never quite succeeded. My intelligent, funny, artistic mother was full of joy and anger. Contradictions that were often hard to understand. I believe we can unwittingly, inherit things that we thought were left behind in our past. I believe, attitudes, culture, sometimes trauma can be imprinted into our minds and bodies and as much as we try to deny them, they can surface when least expected.

I am stuck, halfway through my present book, yet suddenly, I am thinking about another project. I feel certain that next, at long last, I need to write about Mary and set us both free from the bindings of the fish and the white apron.

 

My intention to keep a diary of a novel while working on my new book, I’m afraid, has been neglected. I don’t feel too guilty about that since, meantime, I have been working on the novel itself and am happy to report, am making good progress.

Yesterday, I woke late and drove to the river, knowing I would have missed my kayaking friends who paddle upstream on Tuesdays. Contrary to Bom advice, the conditions for paddling were perfect and I decided to go downstream by myself. The only other craft I saw was the Rottnest ferry and, as usual, being on the water sent me into an ataraxic state. Who needs meditation, when you can walk or swim or paddle? As often happens, the characters in my book found me and, together we went down a few more numbat holes, solved some problems, and cooked up a few more.

It always fascinates me how the writing mind works when the body has been given a physical activity other than sitting at the desk in front of the computer. Perhaps, also, while walking on the beach or paddling on the river I am free of the increasing number of distractions that invade our world today. I’m not tempted to look at my emails, or Facebook, or go and get a coffee. The vacuum cleaner and the floor mop can cheerfully be ignored.

However, instead of being on the river, as nourishing as that is, I really need to return to the south west, where my book is set. I need to find a forest, a quite forest track to lead me into my ataraxic space, fed by the beauty and the humming energy of nature. It will be the start of Makaruru, the Noongar season of fertility. It will be cold, perhaps wet, but I feel the need to drench myself in every season in order to give integrity to my tale.  

 

One of the conventions when writing a novel is that there should be conflict. The conflict is usually between the main characters. The cliché is conflict between a man and a woman. After the conflict, they make up and live happily ever after. OK, don’t fret, there will be conflict between the man and the woman. I’m not sure that they will make up and live happily ever after. You will have to wait and see.

However, my story is set in the forests of a south-western Australian timber town, between the 1970s and 2022, so the obvious conflict for me is the one between the conservation movement and many of the locals who depended on the timber industry for work. The classic novel, Working with Bullocks, by Katherine Suzanna Pritchard describes the timber industry in the early days. The forests were vast, and the forest giants were fell by axes and hand-held cross-cut saws. However, before long the unique ecosystems were devoured with greater speed and efficiency, with the help of machines and technology.

 From a young age, I was part of the conservation movement but I only became seriously involved when we started clear-felling our ancient karri forests to turn the trees into woodchips, sent to Japan, to be made into paper. This is the same Japan, if I remember rightly that had declared over 70% of their sacred forests untouchable. What about our sacred forests?

So, this is my conundrum. My fictional family are part of a rural timber community that they love. Do I make at least one of them sympathise with the so-called greenies. One of my main characters is a greenie of sorts. He is an environmental scientist specialising in mycology. Certainly, room for a juicy bit of conflict there. But what of my protagonist. She’s a local from way back. That could prove more complicated.

When researching the conservation movement, I came across this short article that brought back many memories about the history of the conservation movement.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-16/the-decades-long-fight-to-save-wa-old-growth-native-forest/100822968?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web