Ordinary life, remarkable prose
...responsibility, love, betrayal, mystery and guilt
By JANENE CAREY
When I arrive to interview Armidale novelist Wendy James at her home overlooking Curtis Park, I am greeted at the gate by an overly friendly white poodle named Fred, who follows me through the front door and down the hallway to the sunny, north-facing kitchen where Wendy does most of her writing.
Wendy tells me she has just been on the phone to her publisher, trying to sort out a new title for her next book, which is due out in January.
It’s a domestic thriller about a sister presumed dead who reappears after a twenty year absence to claim an inheritance. For the past four years Wendy has been calling it ‘The Return’, but UWA Press say that title has been used before. ‘Where Have You Been?’ is the latest suggestion.
Editing this manuscript for publication is just one of three sizeable projects currently occupying Wendy’s time. She is midway through writing another novel, ‘The Mistake’, as the creative component of a PhD at the University of New England; and she is also working as a part-time research assistant for her supervisor, Dr Anne Pender, helping with a biography of Barry Humphries.
And she has four children – two of them in primary school.
Wendy claims to be ‘a terrible procrastinator’, someone who writes at the kitchen table because it is handy for distractions, and who doesn’t knuckle down to work till two thirty and then stops at quarter to three to pick up the kids, but in the last five years she has published two novels and a collection of short stories and expects her fourth and fifth books to hit the shops next year.
Her first novel, Out of the Silence, about a Federation-era infanticide set in Victoria, received rave reviews and won the 2006 Ned Kelly Award for best first crime novel.
Wendy proudly shows me the statue, featuring the iconic helmet as rough-hewn black column with a red slit for the eyes, resting on a chunky black base.
“Isn’t it funny? It’s very phallic. I do love it,” she grins.
Her second novel, The Steele Diaries, is also historical fiction. With the Sydney art scene as a backdrop, it spans three generations of women and explores the clash between the self-absorbing imperative of artistic creation and the selfless service required of a mother.
It’s not difficult to understand why Wendy might take an interest in this issue, because for her, becoming a mother and becoming a writer occurred almost simultaneously.
She first started entertaining the idea of writing as a career in 1992, when she was in her mid twenties and had a toddler and a newborn baby.
“That’s what made me take myself seriously,” she says. “Having two small children. I thought, I’d better do something. I am actually a grown-up.”
Despite the sleep-deprivation and time constraints imposed by early motherhood, Wendy soon began to garner prizes. Her collection of short stories, Why She Loves Him, includes pieces that were awarded first place in writing competitions in 1994, 1995 and 1998.
“Yes, I had a bit of luck,” Wendy comments. “And luck’s always good. It makes you think you can do it.”
I just laugh at the notion of ascribing her success to persistent good fortune.
Reviewers of Wendy James’s work have spoken of her ‘rich appreciation for the depth and breadth of feminine sensibility’, ‘her style of a limpid beauty… her characters real, haunting, disturbing’. The Sydney Morning Herald described Out of the Silence as ‘a brilliantly cut literary gem sparkling from every angle’.
Unfortunately, so far the sales of Wendy’s books have not been nearly as enthusiastic as her reviews. She admits to being disappointed by this, but says it is very hard to make a living as a writer of literary fiction in Australia.
Hoping to crack the international market with the novel currently underway, she recently signed up with a US-based agent. She expects to finish the manuscript early in 2010 but does not have a publisher arranged.
“It'll go to my noo york agent for placement,” she drawls.
Wendy and I are discussing recurring themes in her stories – women’s lives, fraught relationships, the vulnerability of children, the long shadows cast by small mistakes and guilty secrets – when the poodle reappears with a large wad of paper in his mouth.
While we have been absorbed in our conversation, Fred has purloined several rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom and strewn them all over the floor and sofa in the lounge room. The scene is less appealing than those television ads featuring Labrador puppies would have you believe, because he has chewed up the rolls very thoroughly.
“Dogs and kids – they both hate being ignored, don’t they?” I say ruefully.
It seems a fitting end to the interview – proof, if any were needed, that the work of transforming ideas into orderly sentences somehow gets done, despite the conflicting demands and distractions of ordinary life.
ARMIDALE EXPRESS, MY LIFE, AUGUST 2009
Termite Alert
...Are termites eating you out of house and home?
By JANENE CAREY
When we bought our dream home eight years ago, we assumed we didn’t need a pest inspection. Cold climate, concrete slab, steel frame, brick veneer – no problem, right?
Wrong.
Any pest inspector could have told us that termites are as likely to be found in our kind of house as they are in your average weatherboard bungalow.
House age, rather than construction type, is the key factor in termite presence; and the highly destructive species, Coptotermes acinaciformis, whose subterranean nest can consist of more than one million tiny chomping machines, is common throughout the New England region.
According to the CSIRO, termites affect one in five homes in Australia and cause more damage than fires, floods and storms combined - around $200 million each year.
The pest inspector we didn’t consult before buying our property might have warned us that the previous owner-builder had effectively constructed termite heaven: by nestling garden beds full of woody shrubs right up against the walls of the house and scattering untreated landscaping timbers liberally across the five acres, including a wooden retaining wall metres from the back door.
In fact, they had so much fodder outside that it's no wonder it took them a while to venture indoors.
I was moving furniture, hunting for a lost library book when I discovered termites busily engaged in a recycling enterprise involving my bedside cabinet and the cork tiles upon which it stood.
Initially, I was alert but not alarmed.
Even if we did have termites, our home buildings insurance would pick up the tab for any repairs that were needed, right?
Wrong.
When I rang to make sure that I could unstress, unhassle and unworry about the problem, I was informed that, like most home insurance policies, ours specifically excludes damage caused by insects.
Termites are insects.
We took the bedside cabinet outside and chopped it up for firewood.
That was a mistake, because the termites burrowing through the floor took fright and decamped.
Evan Wright from Pestbusters calls termites 'nature's perfect creation for recycling' and he believes home owners need to know more about them.
"The worst thing people can do when they find termites is to panic. Just cover them up, leave them alone, and call a professional to deal with the problem," he advises.
Evan has known people to respond by deploying fly spray, but as he points out, you have to destroy the nest, which may be up to 80m away from where the termites are working.
"Termites are sensitive to intrusion, and will move somewhere else if you disturb them. A guy I know who treated the termites in his fence posts with chemicals found out three months later that he'd just encouraged them to relocate into his house. A termite colony will protect itself. If there's a quarter of the colony affected with a foreign substance or a poison, they will sacrifice that quarter - just lock it off and let them die."
For environmental and health reasons, it is no longer legal to treat termites with organochlorines. Baiting systems are a popular option nowadays - they work by enticing the termites to feed on wood doctored with a substance that destroys the colony when it is carried back to the nest.
There are three termite baiting systems registered for use in Australia: Nemesis, Exterra and Sentricon.
A trap for new players (which of course we fell into) is that although these systems work in a similar fashion, they do vary quite markedly in price. Individual pest control companies usually don't offer all three types, so you may end up paying for multiple inspections in order to get a full range of quotes to choose from.
Based on our experience, a pest inspection costs around $180 and a 12-month program of termite eradication can set you back from $1800 to $2800.
You may also decide that you need ongoing monitoring, which we found can range from $600 to $1200 a year, depending on the baiting system and the pest control company chosen.
The CSIRO fact sheet on termites, which can be found at http://www.csiro.au/resources/Termites.html, notes that they are most active from early spring to late summer, and advises home owners to have a program of regular inspections arranged with a pest controller - twice a year in warmer climates, once a year in colder climates.
ARMIDALE EXPRESS, MY LIFE, OCTOBER 2009
Volunteers abroad
...when good intentions confront intractable problems…
By JANENE CAREY
In 1987, I spent a month in Nicaragua helping to bring in the coffee harvest - one of hundreds of international brigadistas who went there to pick beans and build schools in support of the Sandinista revolution.
Eight years earlier, the people of this small Central American republic had succeeded in toppling the Somoza dictatorship, ushering into power a leftist government with a reformist agenda for literacy, health care, education, unionisation, women’s rights and land distribution. However, it wasn't long before the new Nicaragua found itself at the pointy end of an economic and military destabilisation campaign, waged by counter-revolutionaries and covertly funded by the United States of America.
My motivation for joining the work brigade was a mixture of curiosity and passion. I was intrigued by the Nicaraguan social experiment, eager to see it at first-hand, and keen to do whatever I could to actively bolster its chances of success. And, to be honest, I was following my heart, which at that time was firmly in the grip of the tall, blond, seductively articulate idealist who had introduced me to protest marches and the poignant lyrics of Chilean songwriters.
But our grand adventure left me with some misgivings.
Before going to Nicaragua, I’d assumed the labour shortage was directly attributable to the war, and that the function of the international brigades was to help fill the breach. I ended up realising both these assumptions were hopelessly simplistic.
The Nicaraguan economy had chronic structural problems that were not caused by the war, although of course the war made them worse. The number of people in the service sector was grossly disproportionate to the number in the productive sector. And it was easy to see why. Somebody hawking snow cones at a Sunday baseball match in Managua could make more money in a day than a farm worker could earn in three weeks. Facing rampant inflation, the government had limited capacity to deal with this issue by raising the minimum agricultural wage.
The international brigades did serve to put more hands in the fields at harvest time, even if those hands were only picking at roughly half the rate of a skilled worker. We brigadistas went to Nicaragua with good intentions and much enthusiasm, but our presence there had some paradoxical repercussions.
After a long hot day of labouring, queuing to hand-wash our clothes was the last thing we felt like doing. So we employed a local woman to do all our washing. She would otherwise have been picking coffee, but she could earn so much more by selling her services to us that she was quite happy to change careers twice a week. So was our full-time cook, Luisa. So too were the people who trotted up the mountain to sell us sweetbread and watermelon.
By the time I left, I'd begun to wonder whether we were part of the solution or part of the problem. I was haunted by visions of a Nicaragua in which all the productive, export-revenue earning work had to be done by inefficient volunteers, because the locals were so busy servicing those who had come there to 'help'...
The complex, intractable situations that can unexpectedly confront well-meaning volunteers in developing countries, and the distortions that aid itself can induce, are themes explored by Robin Jones in the book she is writing about her year in Africa.
Under the auspices of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), Robin went to Lobone in South Sudan, a camp of 32,000 people who had fled their homes during the course of a long-running, vicious civil war. She arrived in 2006, a year after the peace agreement was signed, to help build the education system by teaching teachers.
With 45 years as an educator behind her, and experience living and working in Ghana and Papua New Guinea, Robin was no starry-eyed girl fresh from university. Also, as one of the founding members of the Armidale Sanctuary group, she had close connections with the Sudanese families sponsored to come and live here.
"Everyone has guns," Daniel Mamer warned her, "but they won’t shoot at you. They don’t often shoot white people."
Robin lived like the locals, on a diet of maize and beans, in a hut made of grass, clay and bamboo, with no running water and only unreliable diesel-generated electricity. Whenever she left the camp, she was accompanied by seven armed soldiers. She expected all of this. What she hadn’t expected was that her attempts to introduce the South Sudanese to best practice teaching methods would meet with such limited success.
"I went expecting that I could train teachers. In five main areas: early childhood, primary, secondary, peace education and adult literacy. But I hadn't realised how resistant to change people who'd gone through 20 years of enormous insecurity would be. While I think I did have an impact on a few, the majority were not in a position to accept new ideas. None of them were trained, so of course they relied on their memories of what their own education had been like. Chalk and talk and using the cane. And they were just emerging from a war. Almost all the teachers were men, almost all of them would have been using guns for the last 15 or 20 years, since they started as child soldiers. Struggling to survive and kill the enemy, stealing food to live. It doesn't put you in a good healthy mental state to take on the ideas of teaching that someone from overseas is bringing," Robin said.
The 200 teachers under Robin's tutelage were only semiliterate themselves and although JRS provided exercise books and pens, neither the teachers nor their students had access to a single textbook.
"No child, no adult, had a book to read or to study or to use in any way at all at school for the whole time I was there," Robin said. "The classrooms had nothing, other than a blackboard and bamboo benches. The kids had to write on their knees. And there was no teacher's desk. Just a blackboard and chalk."
Teachers received a dollar a day. Teaching, nursing and trading were the only occupations in the camp, so positions were highly sought after. Despite this, at any one time only about one-third of the teachers would actually be standing in front of their classes.
Robin's book is a reflective journal about her experiences in Lobone. The entry for Wednesday 8th November 2006 reports some sorry facts about teacher attendance. Ten weeks into a fifteen week term and only three maths lessons conducted. The Primary 6 class had had no English lessons since July. She wrote: "I'm continually amazed that the students keep on turning up, on the off chance that there may be someone there to teach them."
Her biggest concern, however, was a growing awareness of the harm wrought by ill- conceived, irresponsible aid.
"A trillion dollars spent on aid in Africa in the last thirty years and the poverty is greater. I've got grave concerns about the effects of aid. How it creates dependence, lowers self-esteem, creates a handout mentality. Certainly I saw it in a number of the teachers. When they were asked to attend an in-service day instead of teaching, as well as their dollar a day, their pay, they demanded a sitting allowance," said Robin, laughing ruefully. "That's what they called it - an allowance for sitting and listening to Robin!"
The afterword of Robin's book presents a list of practices non-government organisations should observe in providing assistance to individuals and communities. For she is not arguing that there should be no aid. She thinks that aid is essential, especially for health, education and infrastructure and particularly for South Sudan, one of the least developed countries in the world. But it has to be handled in a way that empowers the recipients, works with them rather than for them, and includes a clearly defined exit plan.
Like me, Robin believes her time as a volunteer abroad was valuable and worthwhile, despite the complicated gap between our original intentions and how things panned out. To her surprise, she found her greatest impact was in the human rights area. She spoke to girls about the inadvisability of getting married and having babies at the age of 14, before their bodies were fully formed. She urged them to complete secondary school and argued against the prevailing notion that females have more limited intelligence. She showed the girls how to fashion sanitary pads using material, pins and grass, so that they wouldn't stay home from school for several days each month. During her time in Lobone, a record eight young women completed Secondary 4, roughly equivalent to our Year 10, and the minimum qualification for becoming a teacher.
And me? I eventually realised that the main function of the international brigades was to forge safety links between Nicaragua and the rest of the world. The harvest was never really our coffee beans; it was a crop of well-informed people.
ARMIDALE EXPRESS, MY LIFE, DECEMBER 2009
The Salvos at Christmas
...distributing gifts, rattling the collection tin, feeding firefighters
By JANENE CAREY
In the weeks before Christmas, as most of us begin to wind down and anticipate our well-earned break, the Salvation Army is gearing up for its busiest period.
You'll see them sitting outside Coles, wearing their uniform and collecting donations in a bucket sporting that distinctive red shield. At this time of year, people are feeling magnanimous. Some will toss in whatever coins they can find in their pockets; others will proffer cheques for hundreds of dollars. Last year, the Armidale branch raised more than $10,000 via its Christmas bucket.
Dave, who wanders round the local pubs on Friday nights with his collection tin, will notice the usual surge in business - up to double the normal intake as Christmas Day approaches. He's been sick lately but hopes to be back on the job soon. He hasn't been replaced: it takes a special sort of person to walk into a bar and face a crowd of noisy drinkers.
Every few days, a truck driver from the Family Store will trundle another load of toys from the Kmart Wishing Tree over to the Salvation Army office on Beardy St for sorting. Last year, more than 1000 gifts were distributed across the Armidale district, which covers Uralla, Guyra and out as far as Ebor. In larger centres like Newcastle, there can be twenty or thirty volunteers coordinating the transfer of toy sacks and food hampers to families in need. In Armidale, it's a slick team of half a dozen.
And as the temperatures soar and the bush begins to burn, the Salvos will be out there feeding the firefighters, too. Not just the firies, but also the SES, police on duty, and people with properties in the path of the flames. Recently, on a scorching November weekend, Salvation Army congregations in the north were involved in providing meals on nine firefronts at once.
Major Robert Duncan has been a full-time Salvation Army officer for the past seventeen years, and comes from a family steeped in service.
"I grew up in the Salvation Army," he tells me. "I've been part of it all my life. My parents and their parents were in it as well. On one side, I'm the fifth generation."
This will be his second Christmas in Armidale. The headquarters for the northern NSW division are here, and he is the Divisional Mission and Resource Team Leader. His wife Leanne has the same title and they divide the responsibilities between them. No, it's not a coincidence: if you are married, both must be ordained, undertake the same training, and accept the same commission. There are three officer couples at the divisional headquarters in Armidale.
The number of people seeking help from the Salvos at Christmas time varies year by year. In 2008, with Kevin Rudd tipping dollars into family bank accounts to shore up the national economy, demand was lower than usual. This year, with jobs lost at the Hillgrove mine, the ongoing drought, and the residual effects of the global financial crisis, there could easily be more than a hundred families on the list.
Contrary to what you might think, the Salvos don't do a Santa run on Christmas Eve, dispensing loads of gaily wrapped parcels. Toys and hampers are collected well in advance from the office, and parents are given the opportunity to check that the gifts they have been allocated are suitable.
"These days we try to help families have as much dignity and respect as possible in the process," Major Duncan explains. "I'd hate to be a parent and not know the day before Christmas what I've got to give my child. By doing it the week before, the parents know what they're going to receive.
"Occasionally we get second-hand toys from people, but we don't distribute them. We try to find other means of using them. They're not thrown away, but we don't hand them out at Christmas. Kids might feel like they're second class, and we don't want that."
Families receive a mix of stocking fillers and more substantial presents which are age and gender appropriate; a hamper containing the makings of Christmas lunch; and often a card to buy food items of their own choice. Usually there are not enough presents to go round all the adults; sometimes there is a shortfall amongst a certain age group of children. Boys aged ten to thirteen years tend to be overlooked by the gift givers, and when this happens some of the cash donated to the Christmas Appeal is used to supplement the stock.
Major Duncan says he is constantly amazed by the generosity of people. Donations come flooding in from individuals, businesses, schools, even motorcycle clubs. Each year, a hundred or so of the local bikies form a cavalcade and ride from Uralla to Armidale, all bearing gifts.
"One of the guys comes as Santa Claus, on a bike. Last year it was pouring rain. You should have seen him - dressed as Santa Claus, all soaking wet! They stop at the Information Centre and Rotary do a barbecue for them and we take our truck down and collect the toys."
The 2009 bikers' toy run takes place on December 12. Two weeks before Christmas - right when the Salvation Army swings into full-on action for another festive season.
AND FINALLY, from Friday October 30, 2009...
Here's a link to the original Armidale Express story (well, the first page of it) about Rebecca James's fairytale publishing deal:
http://covers.ruralpress.com/frontpages/5/26641.pdf
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