Prayer for Those in a Coma: Bruce Dawe and my teenage nervous system

By the age of seventeen the only heroes I had were literary. I know that sounds like I'm making it up as an adult but it's true. Still a child, I'd lost myself in the complete many volumes of Dickens at the top of the white shelf in the library at home. They were old commemorative editions with beautiful yellowed plates of the masterful illustrations of  Phiz and Gillray. Then it was Jules Verne. I knew his name for the steampunk before their time films of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leauges Under the Sea. But the first novel of his I read was Drama in Livonia, a Russian-influenced whodunnit. I can still remember the breathless empathy I felt with the nameless figure of the opening who ran for his life through a dark and frozen landscape. My brother was into cricket, often listening a wall away, to the micro hurricane howls of short wave radio of the games at Lords deep into the night. I didn't see the point in that. If you gave everyone of them a ball they wouldn't have to fight over it. No, the imagined realm was where I walked when I wasn't walking here.

Soon enough all this turned to sterner stuff and out came the Orwell, Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess and Kurt Vonnegut. This world was populated with victims that felt pain when injured, met the hostility of the world around them with wit or a sense of the absurd and knew that the currency of language, gold standard of ideas. These authors I trusted as seasoned guides. They cast light upon the shadows beyond the influence of my cloak of middle class comfort, warned me of the dangers of being conspicuously alive and the worse ones or feigning death among the living. As to poetry I found it as threatening as that James Joyce person that Nanna was always on about who seemed to offer nothing but more mystery. And then I read a poem called Hopeless Bloody Hopeless.

It was in a Secondary School English reader that had belonged to one of my siblings and included page after page of extracts of novels, journalism and poetry that first arrested and then hooked me. Hopeless Bloody Hopeless came one step closer to me than anything else in that already bold congregation: it was in Australian. It's a list of despairing images taken from life and filtered through Dawe's poetics and is deceptively plain spoken until a zinger breaks the surface here and there. The illustration was a photo of a beauty queen appearing for charity with a spastic child. The juxtaposition of this intentionally heartwarming image and the scabrous verse beside it sent me into the same kind of dizzy horror as when I saw my brother's Frank Zappa album covers or a lot of the sleeve art to come once punk rewrote the book. I felt guilty for looking but weak for not looking, self-hating for pushing anything remotely corrective like pity, and lastly worried in that cold and blubbery worry that once it's found you is with you for life. Because of a poem.

As luck would have it we had a volume of Dawe's called Condolences of the Season which I read the way I listened to new albums by bands I loved, carefully, in awe and several times a day.

So that when we got to choose an elective for English I went for Australian poetry without even looking at the others. And it didn't occur to me to care about what anyone else thought about it. I needed to know things.

Mr Handicott took it: Contemporary Australian Poetry. He was a published poet himself, a practicing Christian who once put a small play I'd written at the top of the class but forbade us performing it as it took the lord's name in vain (I would have done a rewrite if I'd known, fer Chrissakes!) He also had a huge Victorian explorer's beard which might have been an heirloom as its rust red was at embarrassing odds with the mild chaos of straw exploding from his skull (his case was the first I knew of to be called cheese and tomato). In another class he'd read out one of his own pieces about wining and dining a woman who then turned cold at the sight of his former lover through "the window of my wallet". Might sound naff described so but it had both comedy and sadness blended well and was judiciously chosen by a teacher wary of his students' imagining of his life beyond the quad. Anyway, he took the modern Australian poetry elective and offered us a feast.

We got the Judith Wrights, Kath Walkers and Kenneth Slessors in normal English class but here we got the good stuff, the fresh, the poetry published that year, that month. He showed us the short, fat journals emblazoned with cartoons of mafia funerals or barbarian hordes, all refering to the fact and act of the current poetry of the wide brown land. I couldn't believe it but I didn't have time to as Roneo-ed sheet after purple sheet landed on the desk including, with its pleasantly rummy fumes, the breath of fire.

One I wish I remembered better was by Rae Desmond Jones. It was a narrative. A woman from the upper middle world gets out of her Merc and happens to walk down a laneway  between factories where she is attacked and spread over the bonnet of the Merc and sprayed with gold paint. Her attackers kneel and pray to her "but the machines do not stop".

It sent shivers down my spine just to think of it and I had trouble re-reading it the same way I couldn't bring myself to look at the full page photo of the dying victim of Buchenwald in the big World War II history book in the library. So poetry was what I wanted to do from then on.

....

But whenever I tried it nothing came out. Nothing worth anything. Seriously, without false modesty, I tried my hand at poetry but bullshit bullshit bullshit was all that I could fashion. But then, on some grey predawn back there late in the year, I stopped chopping up the lines like lettuce and allowed them to join until they had to end and what I had was dowdy ol' prose, country cousin to the rarefied verse.

First thing I did was write a play. It was a Pinter ripoff -- my sister was studying him at uni and there was a production of The Homecoming which really put the hook in me -- but it was an ok Pinter ripoff with just enough Goodies and Python in there to make it seem like I'd given the ripoff process a little thought. Oh, the other influence was Look Back in Anger which ranted with the anger of an adolescent who'd watched some movies and read some books beyond his years. I'm not trying to diminish John Osborne, there, but giving you the self-flattering reason for my admiration of it. My play was called A Tinful of Potholes. It got one reading with my sister and a few actors she had indulgently invited around. It would embarrass me now. I haven't kept a copy but I remember feeling proud of it. Why not? I knew very few others of my age who'd attempted anything like it and none of them had finished theirs.

That was almost it for plays. There were a few others but it wasn't until much later that I had anything performed. Besides, something else happened. Back in the normal English class, Mr Cooke took us through the dramatic monologue, particularly Browning's My Last Duchess and Eliot's Journey of the Magi. That last one sold me and I kept a copy of Eliot's selected works handy. Really, it was in my port along with the vegemite sandwiches and Web of Life. So I wrote an exercise book of Eliotesque drivel. One piece from that did work, though and I revisited it many times since was initially called the Patrol. Eventually, needing material for the last Cubist Cigars show I redrafted it as The Soldier's Story and performed it at 45 Downstairs in February 2009. So something came of that.

But it ran its course. No, I couldn't write like TS Eliot but I could at least sound like Bruce Dawe. Bruce Dawe whose work was Biblical and vernacular, worldwise and sentimental and very, very Australian. I had a copy of the anthology Condolences of the Season. I've still got it. The spine has gone but my sister's name and address are clearly biro-ed on the title page for all the honest world to see. I couldn't write like Bruce Dawe either. Well, not poetry. He helped me with my prose, though. Even after the maelstrom of James Joyce's influence it's Dawes that still kids me that I can do something with these memories. He wrote the poem that finally turned me from claims at poetry and the resignation that I was better folding that into what I could do with prose. Prayer for Those in a Coma describes the comatose as sailors who are drifting in dark waters following a submarine attack. It ends with these words and they steady me to this day:

"Lord, whom our coma helps us not to see,
these men are tired and weary of the sea..."

That Incredible Summer: what The Monsoons isn't

I hate coming of age stories. Too negative? Alright, the ones I like, the exceptions, are the ones that know how much damage life's lessons can bring. No better? Ok, my problem with coming-of-agers is that they sentimentalise the process. However honestly they might treat the issues the notion that the crises of the young are just passing trifles annoys me. Some trifles are forever. Some of them slowly poison.

Also, the assumption that life lessons are taken on board and nourish the young receptor is rubbish. An adolescent ego will do everything it can to resist any information that dares to challenge it. It's in the job description. Initial sexual experiences, for example, are poor teachers. Almost all first times are nasty. It's like assuming a natural virtuosity on a musical instrument and then producing nothing but room-emptying noise once you touch the real thing. That stops no one. Biology is a party animal.

Coming of age, if such there is, is only knowable in maturity and cannot be depicted during adolescence without a lot of spin. By that stage it's a sentimental and time-consuming waste of thought. My point in depicting these characters at seventeen is that it means that they are between adolesence and adulthood by decree of the laws of their tribe, something so distant and abstract it may as well be a set of runes.

The spectre of imposed adulthood is what haunts these characters: responsibilities that only the dull are ready for, the imperative to escape that wrestles with the pleasure of being loved and fed which has been good enough so far no matter how bratty we've been. Who among them is going to care if they've come of age?

The other thing that The Monsoons isn't is nostalgic. You'll hear tell of a few cultural and historical points here and there but the setting is as it is for reasons mentioned in earlier posts (the plainer language of the teens at that time which was adopted in reaction to the cool talk of the previous generation/the change of decade/me writing about a time that I lived through at that age/etc) and that it can be easily transported to now.

Also, almost in opposition to that, there are facts of contemporary technology that would sink plot points in the 70s before I got to them. They're on an island. No blog, no phones, no Facebook friends, not a single luxury. Of course I could contrive plot points to eradicate these but then I'd have to write contemporary teenagers and I'm not going to intrude on them with a lot of goof talk. So, it's 1979.

So, it's 1979, that incredible summer when I saw for the first time that even the strongest of us could cry and that love could turn with an evil face, when I tasted the first drops of the nectar of ... Actually that's the kind of blerg I used to write in the name of free verse (ie poetry for those who can't tell the difference between literary discpline and bullying). Now, I'm not damning nostalgia. It plays a vital role in our self esteem and capability to grasp life. I just don't like it when it is the purpose rather than the paint box of a story.

The holiday I had just after school on Magnetic Island was brief (less than a week for me) and was fun. A couple of things I noticed gave me the idea that I should record them. One thing really sent shivers and not  good ones.

There were about five of us at the house for that time but plenty of people dropped in.They were a real mix. One girl had boyfriend drama and seethed at the point of implosion all day long. A sporty thug who banged on the door and forced us to come with him and either (if female) join him in his speedboat or on the skis it dragged or (if male) watch. There were others and a lot of them were like this and hurtled into their fun with the sense that school had been good and never had to end even if there were no teachers 'n' stuff. They didn't just remember nicknames and dead reputations, they enforced them with an almost audible scream of terror under every breath.

I really liked my schooldays but more and more I had been enjoying the life I led outside it, the gigs and uni student parties etc. When it ended I felt relief. I suppose that means I coped well with rather than liked my schooldays but I'll take that over the ticking bomb of denial that some of these people were hosting. No, it wasn't just youthful fervour, it was a wish that everything they had won in the classroom, quad, refectory and oval was theirs for life and they demanded a kind of cultural superannuation whereas we who had struggled with less driven hatred would be condemned to a kind of young age pension and a life of slowburning derision ... kind of worked out that way for a fair few, actually. Anyway... It chilled me to see this walling off of the future but it warmed me to hear one acquaintance who had been an inveterate bully tell me he wanted a career in customs to fight fauna smuggling. I don't know if he got that. Hope so.

The other thing I felt was fear. My own of course, but that of everyone else as well. Current models can stay at home without shame until their thirties, claiming research. At that time everyone wanted to get out of the family home as soon as possible and live like grown ups. Yes, that phrasing does suggest a kind of paradox but the feeling was there and it was accompanied by the gut-clearing fear as constant as the ring of tinnitus, that they'd leap from the nest and fall to the ground and break their wings and be eaten by a ... uh ... cat.

Tearing to get out and terrified of what was outside. The big black Oceanic night thickened outside the window. You could see it through the flyscreens. There was nothing and everything in it. Black the lack. Black the most popular hue in the cosmos. Out among the canetoad choruses, the rain and on dry, moonless nights the lost-soul whistling of curlews. All the worst fantasms we made in the dark when Nana told us bedtime stories came back. We thought we'd controlled them all that time. We thought again.

As for me I remember one thing before anything else. It's a horror and it has no shape.

I'm standing in front of the artificial waterfall on the strand. I've just parted company with Fiona, a friend who had already started to struggle and was patching up all the flaky bits with commercial measures of hedonism. We'd met for a drink, I think. No one met for coffee in a tropical summer.

Anyway, I'm looking up at the waterfall which has been switched off and don't feel like going back home yet. It's January and nothing's happened the way I wanted. I light a cigarette but can't take the first drag because something bad is happening. Suddenly, I'm feeling a kind of swelling nausea. It starts in my stomach and expands pushing in every direction. I drop my cigarette and can do nothing but stare at the waterfall. I don't know if I'll be able to keep standing. I think I'm going to die. I'm wearing sunglasses but the glare is eating through them. It's well over 30 degrees Celsius but I feel ice spreading from my centre outwards. I have the feeling that nothing I can do can change this. Nothing I am or could be can change this. This is how the end of the world will feel. This is how it does feel. This is it.

A beat later, I scrape the cigarette butt into the gravel and light another one. I head off to my bus stop and wonder if anyone's called while I've been out.

To this day I have no idea what did this. Some bad things were happening but really they were mostly exaggerated annoyances which I'd forget about as soon as something else happened. This was a depth of fear I had never known before, scarier as it seemed to have no cause. I have a nagging feeling that there was something that triggered it but I've never been able to work it out. That leads to even scarier thoughts that I've been keeping something nasty behind a screen. It's still there when I remember. The details fade but the feeling is unforgettable. It doesn't lurk but I can't shake the fact that even for only a few seconds I was possessed by it.

I didn't approach it with any courage in the written version of The Monsoons. Too close in time. But as soon as I started drawing the comic version of the opening chapter where Gail is waiting on the PIcnic Bay Jetty for the boat, I saw what I'd been trying to put there. I felt it come back. And then I had the real monster.