Scene – at my local Telstra shop.

Me: “I’m not sure what to do, I’ve smashed the screen of my iPhone, but I believe I have insurance…”

Them: “The best thing to do is to call Telstra, find out if you have Stay Connected and take it from there – if you have Stay Connected, you get two gigabytes of free data, and they will replace the phone.”

Me: “Really? That sounds simple…I was thinking of just getting the screen replaced in the shopping centre…”

Them: (Sternly.) “If you do that Madam, you will null and void your warranty and any problem you have with your phone will not be covered. Would you like to wait in the queue? Our waiting time is only four hours at the moment.”

Me: “Oh. No, I’ll go home and call Telstra.”

* * * * *

Them: “I already have your year of birth so please tell me the day and month or enter it on your telephone keypad…”

Me: “May 15.”

Them: “Is that…the 25^th of October?”

Me: “No.”

Them: “Please tell me the day and month of your birth or enter it on your telephone keypad…”

Sometime later:

Them: “How may I direct your enquiry? Blah, blah, blah or blah, or other?”

Me: “Other…”

Them: “Sorry I didn’t quite catch that…”

Me: “Other!”

Them: “So that would be telephone sales?”

Me: (Sighs.) “Yes.”

Person answers.

Them: “So you’re interested in purchasing a new phone.”

Me: (Patiently.) “No. I dropped my iPhone and smashed the screen, and I believe I have insurance.   I was told at the Telstra shop that you provide a replacement phone, and that with Stay Connected I can back-up two gigabytes of data.”

Them: “I’m sorry, that’s not my department. But I’ll put you through immediately to Stay Connected. Is there anything further I can help you with?”

Me: (Politely.) “Thank you, but no thank you.”

Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum…

Me: ”Oh hello! Yes, I’m ringing about my iPhone, I dropped it and smashed the screen and I was told…”

Them: “Yes, that’s right. All you have to do is download the Stay Connected app, then you follow the instructions and you can back-up all your data. When you get your new phone simply follow the prompts and ALL your data will be restored…”

Me: “Really? That’s fantastic! Thank you.”

Them: “Perhaps you would like to stay on the line and complete a short survey?”

Me: “Sure.” (Thinks, in your dreams.)

A few days later, new phone arrives. Download Stay Connected App onto old phone (which is still working held together by sticky tape and Gladwrap). Instruction tells me I can’t download data, because I have too much on the phone. Start to delete. Keeps telling me I have too much. I get below ONE gigabyte, still tells me too much.

Them: “…I already have your year of birth so please tell me the day and month…”

_________________Readers fill in the blanks.

Them: “Hi there, I’m Cherie from Stay Connected. How can I be of service?”

Me: “Well, the thing is I smashed my iPhone….I’m trying to use the Stay Connected App. I was told it took two gigabytes of data and I’m way below now.”

Them: “Oh, well, I’m sorry but the App is down at the moment. It’s being redesigned, and in fact you have FIVE gigabytes of FREE data on it.” (Said in tones of great excitement.)

Me: (With just a touch of sarcasm.) “So I’ve just deleted most of the photos and videos on my phone to get it below the two gigabytes I thought I had, and in fact your App is not working, but if it was I would have five gigabytes, which means I’ve completely unnecessarily cleared my phone out?”

Them: “That is unfortunately the case. However, have you ever backed up your phone through iTunes?”

Me. “Yes, I have.”

Them: “Well, due to our App currently being redesigned, perhaps the best idea would be to back up your old phone to iTunes and then insert your new phone, and instead of clicking up setting up new phone, click restore phone…”

Me: “Good idea. I’ll do it that way. Thanks for your help.”

Them: “Thank you and perhaps you would like to stay on the line to complete a short survey?”

Me: “Fine.” (Thinks, in your dreams).

Back up old phone to iTunes. All G, as they say. Insert new phone. Message. Your phone cannot be connected to iTunes because your iTunes needs updating. Hmmm. Update iTunes. Your update cannot be installed because your operating system needs updating. Hmmmm. Update operating system. Your operating system cannot be updated because you don’t have enough free space. (Also although they don’t say this, someone out there is going, PLUS your stupid MacBook is way too old, Loser, and you ain’t never going to have El Capitaine on that thing…and if you can’t afford a new laptop you don’t deserve to back up your phone anyway…)

Them: “So I can direct your enquiry to the right place….”

Me: (Screaming) STAY CONNECTED STAY CONNECTED STAY CONNECTED.

Them: That would be, moving house?

Me: NO. You idiot. I am not effing moving house.

Them: “I’ll put you through now.”

(I’m pretty sure she said it in huffy tones – they probably have a huffy robot tone…)

One hour later.

Them: “What seems to be the problem?”

Me: (Sobbing quietly.) “I smashed my iPhone…”

Them: “I can hear you’re having some problems. Have you tried downloading your data to the cloud – have you done that yet?”

Me: (Deep sigh.) “I tried once but it seemed to take a long time.”

Them: “The first time does take a while but I’m sure that will solve your problem, and it’s very easy, you just……………”

SIX hours later – you know the drill. “Welcome to Telstra. I already have…”

Me: (Finally talking to a person.) “Look, I’m having some troubles downloading my data to the cloud – it’s been six hours so far and it doesn’t seem to have finished yet…”

Them: “Let’s see if there’s a problem.” Goes away. Dum-de-dum-dum-de-dum.

Them: (In an accusatory voice.) “Your internet is working very slowly…”

Me: “Yes, that’s something I’ve been meaning to mention…the Telstra shop told me that I could get NBN where I live, I’m thinking it would be a good idea.”

Them: “Let me see.” (Pause.) “Unfortunately you can’t get NBN where you live. Have you tried backing your phone up to iTunes?”

Me: (Frothing at the mouth.) “Sorry, I have to go, I have an emergency…”

Them: “Perhaps you’d have time to complete a short survey?”

Me: “Sure.” (Thinks) In. Your. Dreams.

THE NEXT MORNING – phone STILL downloading to the cloud. But at 4.00 am I had a bright idea. My next door neighbours have a Macbook Air.  I throw myself on their mercy.  We create a user profile for me. I download iTunes, log in, and back up my old phone to it. I plug in the new phone – and Yippee!!!! It works. Data restored.

It’s only taken 36 hours, and I’m – oh yes – SO connected but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to talk to Telstra about the NBN.

Candida Baker’s latest book is Belinda the Ninja Ballerina published by Ford Street.  You can purchase the book here: fordstreetpublishing

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Whenever there is a disaster, natural or otherwise, in the world, it does a curious thing – it brings out the best in us. All of us stop for a moment, don’t we, and feel a mixture of gratitude that we and our loved ones are safe, and sorrow for those suffering from the earthquake, tsunami, bushfire, flood, hurricane – or most recently the tragedy in Paris.

It’s then that our natural compassion comes to the fore. And yet, curiously, compassion, the virtue of empathy for the suffering of others, is not necessarily as readily available to us at other times. In our ordinary, everyday lives it seems as if (on the face of it) we have less need of compassion than at those times of crisis, be they family, community, or world-wide.

Deepak Chopra writes in his book Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul of the Tibetan Buddhist monks who developed ‘compassionate brains’ as the result of practicing a meditation on compassion, thereby transforming a spiritual quality into physical manifestation, erasing the split between body and soul.

To become compassionate, or more compassionate takes practice (as does every emotion, both good and bad). It’s not good enough to just think about being compassionate, or even learn about it, it’s about somehow rewiring the brain so you walk in other people’s shoes. Growth is exponential, as we begin to feel and practise compassion in one area of our lives, it begins to flow into other areas.

How do you practice something you can’t see? It’s not like riding a bicycle exactly, but curiously the steps are very much the same. You choose to be genuinely interested in compassion, you pursue your interest spontaneously – choosing for instance to feel compassion instead of critical towards someone whom you believe has slighted or behaved badly towards you. You stick with the practice until you get good at.

One of the ways to cultivate compassion is to try feeling compassionate for yourself – which, when you stop and think about it is much easier said than done. In fact, it’s downright difficult to be compassionate about what may seem afterwards to be obvious mistakes we’ve made, and yet if we can’t feel true compassion towards ourselves how can we feel it towards others?

Children, of course, can swing between compassion and sympathy, between cruelty and scorn in a millisecond, but as we grow up our ability to be compassionate is often diminished by what we perceive to be condemnation towards us, and by the time we are adults, our natural compassion has got buried under a ton of beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.

But when disasters strike – manmade, as in Paris, or through the sheer force of nature – compassion becomes a natural response, and thank goodness for that.

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I was just settling down to plan my Friday night – dinner, a movie, that sort of thing, when my teenage daughter, aka The Princess, called me.

“The thing is Mum,” she said, “there’s four of us, and we’ve all got tickets to Fright Night, and we don’t know how to get there and back.”

Oh. Really. Damn.

So there we are a few hours later, the four of us tootling up the Highway to Movie World where, apparently, I’m going to spend four hours being scared out of my brain. Not only that, but it becomes obvious from the moment we step inside the gates and are greeted by a blood-spattered zombie, I’m going to spend it ALL ALONE, because four teenage girls have disappeared into the dark terror-filled night, to somehow – surprise, surprise, meet up with teenage boys – and one late (very late) middle-aged mother, is standing, just a tad mystified, surrounded by acres of smoke-filled air filled with the sounds of sirens, chainsaws and screams.

I got my bearings by slinking around, with my back to the wall, my camera held out in protection, as I tried to look very cool, not flinching at all when the mad chainsaw massacre man wielded his machine of death up and down the main street and the scariest, bloodiest, masked men I’ve ever seen jumped out at me from – oh my god – strobe lighting. I tried to emphasize my absolute professional disinterest in all things scary – simply here to take photographs, observe, you know, that sort of thing.

They walk amongst us…leap out and scare us – and we love it…

It was with a huge sense of relief that I chanced upon The Space Cowboy’s Show. One of Byron’s own colourful characters, I’ve seen several of his shows, and so I relaxed, while he merely juggled chainsaws, real this time, until the man with the Pig Face mask booed me from behind.

“Enough,” I thought, and headed for, of course, Rick’s Café Americain, where they have a Fright Night special of all you can eat pizza, pasta, salad and dessert for $15. Well, I can tell you, you can make an all-you-can eat dinner last a very long time if you space yourself, and the food looked way more attractive than the doughnuts I’d seen on the way in, complete with blood filled syringes. Injecting my food has never been high on my list of priorities for a Friday night.

After dinner I took to the horror-filled streets again, and was amazed by the amount of apparently not scared small children running around. If a three-year-old could talk to zombies, I figured, so could I, so the next time a few of them lurched at me, I had a chat and asked them all about themselves. The only problem was they were talking zombie language, and I couldn’t understand a word, but we parted on friendly terms – I think.

Talking ‘Zombie’…

I’m not quite sure when I realised I was actually enjoying myself – there’s nothing like going outside your comfort zone to upset the equilibrium – in a good way, and this was truly fun, especially once I got brave enough to stop slinking in the shadows.

I talked to a friendly vampire ambulance driver, who told me that Fright Night had started just as a Halloween night back in 2006, and had become increasingly popular, so that now it’s on every Friday night throughout October, the culmination of course being Halloween.

It’s a strange idea really that there are hundreds and thousands of us who will pay good money to go and be scared out of our wits, but the show is truly value for money. I couldn’t quite cope with the idea of going through the scary mazes by myself, and The Princess’s phone was definitely off to Mother callers, but I talked to some people at the exits who were in awe of everything.

“It’s like, really scary,” said one girl.

She’s like, so right.

When I finally met up with The Princess and her friends, and we headed for home, they talked excitedly for half-an-hour and then fell sound asleep.  The Mother taxi wended its way back down the highway. Not my usual Friday night, but a fun and freaky one for sure.

Flame throwers, the bearded lady, Byron’s Space Cowbody, Fright Night food, and more…

For more information and to book tickets go to: frightnights.com.au

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It seems to me that there is irony of extraordinary proportions being played out in Australian public life at the moment.

In one corner we have Bronwyn Bishop, caught red-handed over a continual and massive misuse of taxpayers funds to take her to weddings, parties – anything, and it seems as if, apart from a gentle slap on the wrist, this most biased of Speakers will retain her job and continue, Hyacinth Bucket-like, a silver spoon firmly planted in her mouth, and an attitude that strongly suggests she is not actually sorry, she’s just sorry she got caught.

In the other corner we have Adam Goodes. Goodes was born in South Australia to a father of Celtic ancestry and a mother who is an Indigenous Australian, of the Adnyamathanha and Narungga people. He is one of Australia’s most successful sporting stars of all time – dual Brownlow medallist, Australian of the Year for 2014, co-founder with his cousin Michael O’Loughlin of the GO Foundation, an organization that helps support younger Indigenous people. Goodes is a regular visitor to youth detention centres, and is heavily involved in Indigenous sporting programs, and yet this most extraordinary man, who has lived the past two years of his high-profile, successful life surrounded by a murky haze of racism, is stepping down – possibly permanently – because of the continued stress.

In this decision, The Swans are 100% behind him, and have taken the extraordinary step of giving Goodes extended leave for as long as he needs so that he can come to a decision about his playing future.

To put the importance of this decision into context it is not just the ‘war dance’ incident that is at play here. In May 2013 a 13-year-old girl called him an ‘ape’ during a match against Collingwood in the Indigenous Round – Goodes didn’t let it go. He called the girl out on the incident and watched as she was removed from the ground. Afterwards he told reporters he was “gutted…the win, the first in 13 years, to be up 47 points against Collingwood, to play such a pivotal role, just sort of means nothing. To come to the boundary line and hear a 13-year-old girl call me an ape – and it’s not the first time on a footy field that I’ve been referred to as a ‘monkey’ or an ape, it was shattering.”

In that particular case, closure seemed swift with Goodes announcing on Twitter only an hour and a half later that the girl had been in touch. “Just received a phone call from a young girl apologizing for her actions. Lets support her please#racismitstopswithme #IndigenousRound,” he tweeted.

Adam Goodes with his Australian of the Year award.

Everything seemed to go quiet for a while – Goodes Australian of the Year award was (or seemed to be) universally accepted as well-deserved honour, and if there was a murmur of dissent it was more from the Left, who wondered how Goodes could accept an honour announced on the very day that is so loaded for Indigenous people. At the same time, I’m sure nobody doubted that the award would add much-needed support for Goodes and his strong anti-racism advocacy.

Then in May 2014, Essendon revoked the membership of a supporter accused of making racist comments toward Goodes at Etihad Stadium, although Goodes was not aware of the incident until after the game. “To have Essendon members alert stadium security to the incident is a great indication that people in the football community will not tolerate racial vilification,” he said.

But then came the war cry – a powerful, electric moment if ever there was one, and simply, according to Goodes who adopted the cry from the underage Indigenous Boomerangs his way of displaying his pride in the AFL’s Indigenous Round.

What’s happened since is so ugly, so divisive, so wrong, culminating in the game-long booing towards Goodes from the West Coast Eagles last weekend, that it’s hard, even with a Pollyanna hat on, to find any positive outcome.

The War Dance catches on: Sydney Swans player Lewis Jetta celbrated an early goal against the West Coast Eagles with a dance in support of Adam Goodes.

I came to Australia forty years ago, travelling around country New South Wales and Queensland on a theatre tour. I was 20 years old, straight from the London of the mid-1970s – a multicultural mixing pot if ever there was one. To say that I, and the company I was with, was surprised by the racism we encountered in Australia would be an understatement. We were shocked to our collective core to find such a divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and it was only reinforced a few years later when I travelled around Australia reporting on a car rally. Separate laws for black and white, segregated pubs, a general disdain bordering on disgust by white people towards Aborigines, and a racism reserved, it often seemed, solely for the first inhabitants of this land.

What I saw on those, and subsequent travels, was mitigated somewhat by being lucky enough to have some wonderful experiences – including a visit to the Garma festival in north-east Arnhem Land. The 2015 Festival started yesterday, and unsurprisingly, the Booing Saga, as it’s become known, dominated the first day. Several of the Yunupingu clan were vocal in their support: “Players like Goodes are gods out here,” said Gabirri Yunupingu, “they’re very high up. Keep going brother – we’re all behind you.” Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion put it simply and succinctly: “Our mate Goodesy. He needs our support.”

For me the river of mystification around the issue of racism has always run deep. I simply don’t understand why any prejudice should be based on the colour of someone’s skin, and more specifically why Indigenous people are or ever have been ever subjected to any form of racism. They were here first. Simple. They hold the collective cultural dreaming of this massive continent deep in their hearts; they are the keepers and the guardians of the songlines, and of every physical and spiritual facet of this massive continent, which I am privileged to call home.

Of course, being a fairly frequent Facebook user, there have been many of my friends and colleagues who have had plenty to say on the subject. Adelaide-based writer and footy-fan Kerryn Goldsworthy posted this: “They’re frightened of him. (Goodes) They’re frightened of him physically because he’s a big strong fit athlete, they’re frightened of him psychologically because he is Other, and they’re frightened of him morally because he has been the occasion of them having to think about whether or not they are scumbags. Of course they’ve decided they’re not, but they resent having had to think about it.”

Goldsworthy, I think, hit the nail on the head with her ‘Other’ comment, but yet again it begs the question – who is really the ‘other’? Surely, it’s us – or it should be.

Closer to home, here in the Northern Rivers, our own Rhoda Roberts, a member of the Bundjalung Nation, festival director and head of Indigenous Programming at Sydney Opera House, made a simple and powerful statement when she changed her profile pic to one of Goodes, with the words I’m with you Goodes across the image. Sunshine Coast Indigenous artist Jandamarra Cadd told me: “it’s a sad reflection of how much division is actually alive and accepted in this country.”

And Annie Chapelle, owner of the Byron Bay Coffee Company pretty much summed it up for me when she wrote: “Adam Goodes, you are a hero not just because you do so much for Australia, not just because you are an indigenous man, not just because you do so much for indigenous folk, not just because you do so much for youth, not just because you do so much for the game, not just because you were Australian of the year!, not just because of the work you do with health, education and employment and the charity you run with others to place kids into school, but because you are one hell of a decent bloke and a footy hero to boot. I am so saddened that this incredible human is being treated this way. Power to you Adam Goodes.”

Yes.

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You have to stay in shape. My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s 97 today and we don’t know where the hell she is.
 Ellen DeGeneres

Ummm. Excuse me, but how did this exactly happen? It appears I’m turning sixty next week and a third of my life is practically over. (Actually I stole that line from Woody Allen – but you do that sort of thing when you’re turning 60.)

I’ve been having all sorts of random thoughts over the past few weeks, and if I could remember them I’d tell you, but since I can’t, I’ll have to make a few up on the spot.

There is for instance, the fact that because I had my second child, my beautiful Princess Anna, at the age of 45, at the age of 60, I now have a 15-year-old, who is blossoming into beautiful young womanhood just at the same time as my body seems to be giving me warning signals on a daily basis. (I’m increasingly like one of those roads in Queensland where they have signs that say ‘the surface noise is due to the joints in the road.’)

I knew we were back in the land of the Teenager a few months ago when, as I was innocently driving along, absent-mindedly twiddling with the seat with one hand, a sharp voice said. “What are you doing?” I snapped to attention. “What do you mean?” I asked, a slight note of anxiety in my voice – what had I been doing? Talking out loud, spitting, groaning…”You’re….fiddling,” she said in a tone of deep disgust.

And that was it really, that one tiny comment, and I knew that my life was about to irrevocably change. I’ve got more used to it, this being the second time around. I know this time, that I know nothing, that I’m completely out of touch, that I mustn’t sing or dance in public (damn), or preferably talk at all. I certainly mustn’t pretend that I know or understand any teenage language at all. I’m to provide hot food, a comfortable bed, a taxi service, and the occasional cuddle when required, and on the odd occasion some motherly advice. (Actually strike that last bit, I made it up.) And that’s it.

One good thing about being 60 is you argue less. It’s not so much that you’re nicer. It’s that you can’t hear each other. Anonymous.

There’s nothing like turning a decade to cause a bit of soul-searching, and for me I’ve found this last decade a tad mystifying I have to say. Just for instance – I managed to walk away from a successful career, a marriage, real-estate ownership and an income all at once and to replace those things with a never-ending supply of rescue horses, bills, and anxiety. Trying to come up with a good reason as to why anybody would do this to themselves, I came up with the fairly surprising answer that it was to learn emotional lessons. I think, or hope, that in the past ten years I’ve learned to be much more compassionate, empathetic and non-judgmental. I’ve also learned, because I’ve had to, to live in the present moment, to take comfort from the tiny moments of life – the sunrises and sunsets, my animals, and the life, love and laughter which I must say  fills my life on a daily basis. I have also been blessed to receive a depth of love and support from my partner, family and friends  that is simply – and often – beyond comprehension. It makes me think that perhaps I’m not too bad after all.

Life can be – and is – full of surprises. Last year my beautiful son introduced me to his wonderful partner, Brendon, who quickly became a part of our family. They moved back home recently along with Brendon’s two part-time children, two rabbits, a guinea-pig and 20 budgerigars to join our menagerie of four humans, horses, two dogs and a cat. At an age when most people are turning toward Grey Nomading as a lifestyle, I’m kept firmly ‘en place’ by Dance Mom schedules, animal care, and no cash. Oh well, I never really wanted to travel anyway.

God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.

I had to get new glasses the other day. It was a mixed experience. The optometrist told me that my skin looked: ‘good…for your age’. She also told me that if I’d been contemplating laser surgery for my eyes (I hadn’t) it was too late now, due to: ‘your age’. She also said I had some mild infection on the eyelids, which is quite common: ‘in people of your age’, that I had developed, as well as my short-sight and long-sight, slight astigmatism: ‘not uncommon in people of your age’, and suggested that I make sure my vision didn’t get blurry because that could be a sign of cataracts, which are apparently – yes, you guessed it, one of the dangers of being ‘your age’.

One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late. Pablo Picasso

One thing I know – well at least a little bit – is who I am, and curiously, or perhaps rather stupidly it’s taken me 50 years to work out that I still love exactly the same things I loved as a ten-year old: Family, horses, dogs, nature, photography, books, writing and art. I still have so many creative ambitions it’s a bit scary, but at least it’s better than wanting to retire, a concept with which I am completely unfamiliar, since I truly can’t imagine not producing words and images in some form or other. (Which is a good thing given the state of my bank balance.)

For a day, just for one day,

Talk about that which disturbs no one

And bring some peace into your

Beautiful eyes.” Hafiz

Love. Now there’s a thing I’ve discovered over the past ten years – the extraordinary capacity of the heart to love, even the infinite capacity of the heart to love, or as Woody Allen also said, ‘the heart is a resilient little muscle’. It can ache, it can break, but it can mend – and perhaps, as I head towards Mother’s Day and turning 60, and all the richness of a life in all its ups and downs, that is the thing I carry forward most strongly, the knowledge love is truly, all there is.

The post Sing a song of sixty, a pocket full of why… appeared first on .

The Goddess Ostara by Johannes Gehrts, 1884.

Verandah Magazine publisher Candida Baker ponders the many meanings of Easter, and tries to unravel a myth that can include the resurrection of Jesus, chocolate eggs and an Easter Bunny.

A few years ago, around this time of year, one of my friends, who’s from a good Catholic family, decided it was time she and her non-Catholic husband took their children to Italy to see Rome in all its pomp and circumstance. She knew, she said, that she’d rather let the religious educational side of things down when her eight-year-old son said to her, “Mum, who’s this bearded dude, and why’s he hanging up on a cross?”

She was so shocked she sat him down then and there and gave him a potted history of Christianity, the crucifixion and the resurrection. He thought about it for a minute. “It’s quite a good story,” he said, “but I think I prefer the Easter Bunny.”

Of all the festive occasions we celebrate in a year it would have to be said that Easter is perhaps the most confusing. I mean, when you think about it, how on earth do you actually put rabbits, chocolate, eggs, the crucifixion and the resurrection into three short days?

To put on a feminist hat for a moment, Easter is one more example of a pagan celebration that was originally connected to women, but was hijacked over the centuries by the patriarchy to the point where I think you would have a hard time finding even one child who would know that in fact Easter was originally a celebration of spring and fertility. Its name comes from the Saxon goddess of the dawn and spring – Oestre or Eastre, who was known also in Germany as Ostara, Easter connecting to the word ‘estrogen’, or oestrogen, to give it its older spelling – a word given to the group of hormones that regulate women’s menstrual cycle. In Saxon times April was called ‘Ostermonud’ the month in which the cold winds of winter stopped, and the spring began.

Spring Equinox, Ostara, by Amanda Clark.

Ostara, also known elsewhere as Ishtar, had a passion for new life, and her symbol was the rabbit, with its propensity for rapid reproduction. As for eggs – well, once you begin to see the Easter we celebrate as two separate events, (albeit curiously connected) the death and resurrection of Christ, and a celebration of spring and fertility – then eggs are an obvious symbol of fertility, and baby chicks a cheerful symbol of that new life. Always celebrated on the first full moon after March 21^st to mark the arrival of spring, brightly coloured carved eggs, chicks and bunnies all made an appearance, as well as dyed or decorated eggs. Chocolate eggs arrived on the Easter scene in the early 19^th century in Europe, and it was John Cadbury who hit on the jackpot – producing Cadbury’s first chocolate Easter eggs in 1875.

As for the Easter egg hunt, it may well have originated in Europe as the Christians began to persecute the followers of the ‘old ways’. Instead of giving the eggs as gifts to the children, the adults hid them, as they had to hide their religion, and the children had to find them.

Another forgotten Easter practice is eating ham, which we normally associate with Christmas, of course, and even then it is a strictly ‘Christian’ meat, forbidden under the religious laws of Judaism and Islam. Having butchered their meat during the previous autumn so they would have food throughout the winter months, pagans and Christians both used the Easter period as a time to eat the last of the salted, cured meats, and to celebrate the fact that hunting season had arrived. Even the Christian practice of Lent can be traced back to the pagan practice of fasting at the time of the spring equinox, clearing the body of toxins in time for spring.

Personally, I think it’s a loss to the collective imagination of the world that the wonderful myth associated with the Easter Bunny is not taught to children. According to legend, feeling guilty about the late arrival of spring, the Goddess Ostara saved the life of a bird whose wings had been frozen, and kept him as her pet, (and in some versions, her lover) and because he could no longer fly she turned him into a snow hare so he would be able to run from hunters. But in remembrance of his earlier life, she also gave him the ability to lay eggs, in all the colours of the rainbow, one day a year. When the hare angered her (and rumour has it she was quick-tempered) she cast him into the sky as the constellation Lepus (The Hare), where he remains forever at the feet of the Orion. The hare was allowed to come back to earth once a year, but only to give away his eggs to the children at the Ostara festivals. And all of that linked into how important the hare was to many ancient traditions – associated with various moon goddesses and deities of the hunt.

Somehow the innocent hare and rabbit, honoured for their fertility, came to grief under Medieval Christians who determined that witches changed into rabbits in order to suck the cows dry, and that witches could be killed by a silver crucifix, or later a bullet, when they appeared as a hare. Given hares ‘mad as a March hare’ behaviour and their ability to produce up to 42 offspring each spring, it’s understandable that they came to represent excess in general. (You could call that a bit of an ah-hare moment.) Later though, Christianity reclaimed the hare as a symbol of purity, with a white hare at the Virgin Mary’s feet, representing the triumph of virtue over lust.

The connection between Jesus and rabbits comes through the delightful Christian legend about a young rabbit, waiting for his friend Jesus to return to the Garden of Gethsemane, unaware of what has happened to him. Early on Easter morning, Jesus came back to his favourite garden and was greeted to an ecstatic welcome by his little friend. When the disciples came into the garden to pray, unaware of the resurrection, they found a clump of larkspurs, with each blossom bearing the image of a rabbit in its center as a remembrance of its hope and faith.

Old Babylonian period Queen of Night relief, which is considered to represent an aspect of Ishtar.

There’s also, of course, Eastern versions of all these stories – some of them contained in the one of the oldest stories ever discovered, the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh. Ishtar, the goddess of romance, procreation and war in ancient Babylon, was also worshipped as the Sumerian goddess Inanna, known as a ‘mother goddess’, and has the same linguistic derivation as the Northwest Semitic Aramean goddess Astarte.  Ishtar’s sister, Eresh-Kigel, was the ruler of the Underworld, and was the goddess of the opposite forces – death and infertility. Eresh-Kigel kidnapped her sister’s lover, Tammuz and forced him to live half the year in the underworld (similar, of course, to the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone). Ishtar went in search of Tammuz and had to make some pretty heavy threats to Eresh-Kigel before she was allowed into the Underworld to plead for her lover’s return. While she was away from earth, everything shriveled and died, and in various forms of the legend, either Ishtar herself died and was resurrected, or was kept captive in the Underworld for – yes, you guessed it – three days and three nights, her return marking her resurrection, and the arrival of spring.

Noel Coypel, The Resurrection of Christ, 1700.

So there we have it – Easter eggs, the Easter Bunny, the dawn that arrives with resurrection of life, and the celebration of spring all serve to remind us of the cycle of rebirth and the need for renewal in our lives. In the history of Easter Christian and pagan traditions have become so interwoven that it is hard to tell where one story starts and another story ends. Finally, of course there’s the ‘bearded dude’ – who calls us, whatever our faith, to think about what God means to us, and the promise of eternal life.

Easter[nb 1] (Old English usually Ēastrun, -on, or -an; also Ēastru, -o; and Ēostre),[1] also called Pasch (derived, through Latin: Pascha and Greek Πάσχα Paskha, from Aramaic: פסחא‎, cognate to Hebrew: ‫פֶּסַח‬‎ Pesaḥ),[n (source Wikipedia)

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Next Friday, on March 6 – two days away from the official International Women’s Day, when I sit down to chat with three highly visible and vocal women – the Hon Mary Delahunty; producer and writer Deb Cox and journalist and children’s book author Samantha Turnbull on the theme of ‘make it happen’, I think there will be a question that must be asked. And that is, how on earth did Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, become the victim of a merciless vendetta by a government apparently hell bent on undermining any progress we’ve made towards a more equal society?

Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, put it most succinctly in The Guardian online when he wrote that there has always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott Government’s attitude to women. ‘Even in opposition,’ he writes, ‘such sleaze as the menu for a Mal Brough fundraiser depicting Julia Gillard in the most vile way went beyond the vicious into some psychopathology if not too bizarre to divine, then too awful to contemplate.’

Award winning journalist and writer Mary Delahunty will speak at this year’s International Women’s Day Lunch at the Byron at Byron

Mary Delahunty, a former Gold Walkley award winning ABC journalist, and education and arts minister in Victoria’s last Labor government, has brought her sense of compassion and justice to the book Gravity: Inside the PM’s office during her las year and final days, to create a portrait of a woman doing her best to withstand a siege of political and personal proportions rarely, if ever witnessed. Don’t forget Alan Jones’s low moment when he said on radio that Gillard’s father had “died of shame”, or that a Perth radio shock jock had asked her about her long-term partner Tim’s sexuality. At what point has the Australian media ever subjected a male Prime Minister to that kind of bitter and unscrupulous scrutiny?

Writer and producer Deb Cox from EveryCloud Productions.

Where Delahunty uses prose and journalism, writer and producer Deb Cox from Every Cloud Productions, has turned her writing talent to create fictional television and film content as varied as SeaChange, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and The Gods of Wheat Street. All of them gritty and real, and featuring women in starring roles as powerful forces – particularly of course the indomitable Miss Fisher originally created by Australian author Kerry Greenwood. “The attraction to the stories was definitely because Phryne Fisher was such an entertaining but wonderfully subversive, feminist character,” says Cox, “and that laced through with Fiona Eagger’s and my history of wanting to tackle social issues with a balance of grit and humour made it something we could proud of which would reflect the moral values we share.”

Author of The Anti-Princess Club Series, Samantha Turnbull.

Which brings me to the youngest of three who have ‘made ‘it’ (whatever it is) happen’ – Samantha Turnbull. Turnbull, and I’ve had the privilege of working with Sam on the Northern Star – is a force to be reckoned with. Funny, astute and also an award-winning journalist, she found her writing voice when she was searching for a book for her daughter Libby that didn’t feature a princess or a fairy. “I wanted to write stories about girls that don’t actually need rescuing,” says Turnbull, “and that’s how The Anti-Princess Club books were born.” The four-book series, published simultaneously this month, features Emily, Bella, Grace and Chloe – a group of ten-year-old girls determined to prove that it’s a girl’s world, full of adventure, sport and derring-do.

President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs.

In terms of derring-do, Gillian Triggs, as Tess Lawrence wrote in the Independent Australia Online, has proved a fearless public servant, a formidable human rights advocate and guardian of those denied a voice and consigned to the marginalia of justice — especially children.

Lawrence goes on to say: ‘In particular, both her public statements and a recently tabled report The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention (2014) damning Australia’s degraded legal and moral conduct on the plight of those children in offshore detention centres, has incurred the wrath of the Coalition Governent intent on daily painting a whitewash over the black history of our bulk violations of human rights and industrial strength abuse of children, including violence and sexual abuse.’

I hope that Gillian Triggs knows how much she is admired by so many of us – male and female – for her just advocacy of the powerless. Seeing her sad and somewhat haunted expression of late, I hope that Flanagan is right when he says that one day in the future another Prime Minister (perhaps, who knows, another woman brave enough to face the battle against mysogyny) will apologise for our treatment of asylum seekers, and of women and children, and I hope perhaps in the nearer future, that just maybe an apology to Triggs will happen. Perhaps, after the Byron Bay International Women’s Day lunch, taking place once more at the Byron at Byron resort, we can find a way to help make that happen.

Proceeds of the lunch will go to the S.H.I.F.T Project which is aimed at shifting lives, by firstly providing a 12-week transitional program of stable supported housing for women at risk. A few local volunteers and one very generous philanthropic donor have enabled S.H.I.F.T. to open its doors in Byron Bay.

‘Make it happen’ and make a difference by joining the lunch on March 6 at the Byron at Byron.  Cost $65. Tix www.byronunited.org.au <https://www.byronunited.org.au>  or call 0401 592 114.

https://www.internationalwomensday.com/theme.asp#.VO-r1ShpA98

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When Verandah Magazine’s publisher Candida Baker enrolled at university as a mature age student, she found unexpected rewards in learning the art of learning.

Almost three years ago to the day I stood in front of Adelaide University, having enrolled as student in their online Master of Arts in Art History – a degree the University runs in conjunction with the Art Gallery of South Australia.

I was so nervous I bit my nails, and I don’t even bite my nails. Three years, two certificates and a diploma later I’ve handed in my thesis: ‘An exploration of kijin 奇人 – or eccentricity – and its
tradition as an endorsed quality in Japanese art, with specific reference to the work of Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono.’

The odd thing about my journey towards a degree was that I had (or believed I had) no intention of doing one. I was working on something else entirely, googling away, letting my fingers do the walking, when suddenly an ad popped up, advertising this new, arts related MA, and suddenly something inside me gave a shiver of excitement. Even so I was going to ignore the ad, I almost clicked away from it – what do you want to look at that for? I thought, but almost as soon as I’d had that thought I could see the White Rabbit dancing across the screen. Follow me, he was saying. Follow me.

Now, the thing is, (as my Irish grandmother used to say), I’d left school at 17 with a few more ‘O’ Levels than Princess Diana, and fallen into a life of journalism and writing at an early age. Everything I’d learned, I’d learned on the job and there I was at the age of 57 with numerous books published, and a successful career behind me, (and I hope before me too) but there was something missing – a little piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

I’d tried once before – twenty-four years ago to be exact – I’d enrolled in a BA with the University of New South Wales. I’d enjoyed it but work and children had got in the way and I’d had to drop it. All these many years later, I had reason to be thankful I’d even done that one year, because at least I had a slight notion of how to construct an essay.

What I have come to realise over the past three years of working towards my Masters is how important continuing study is for the brain. I don’t think it matters what we’re learning – it could be bee-keeping, permaculture, engineering or, as in my case Japanese art, but something happens when we stretch our grey matter. Emotional intelligence psychologist and author Daniel Goldman wrote that: ‘People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.’ It would be nice to think that was true, but at the time that I enrolled for the degree I was feeling anything but emotionally intelligent, or in fact intelligent in any way, shape or form. I was coming out of some dark days, and I was fragile.

During the three years of studying for my degree ‘stuff’ happened. One of our dogs killed the neighbour’s cat, and had to live life for a year as a dangerous dog, the same dog was almost killed twice by the neighbour’s Ridgeback and my neighbour had to put his dog down; my step-mother died, my father died, a year later our beloved Shetland pony died of a brain tumour. There were health issues in the family that affected my everyday life, a sister on the other side of the world was diagnosed with breast cancer, a relationship suddenly ended, there was (and still is) the ongoing vexed question of living in the county and actually making a living – working, it seems to me sometimes, twice as hard for half as little gain as our city counterparts. There was the joys and frustrations of starting Verandah Magazine, in which you are reading these words.  All in all I learned the meaning of the words anxiety and depression in a way I had never understood them before.

But once a week, no matter what, I had to get myself ready for my online tutorial. I had to read the papers and the books, research my essays, be ready for questions, or to give a presentation. I had to focus, in other words, on the task at hand, and on something beyond ‘me’.

When I enrolled in Art History, a lot of people asked me why – assuming that I would do something connected with writing. But in a way it was exactly because of the fact that I write most days of my life, that I chose to do something else. Not that it made the writing component less, but it meant that rather than thinking about writers and writing I was thinking about art and artists. I’d also been offered (in years gone by) honorary BA’s so I could go straight into an MA in Creative Writing, but somehow it had never seemed right to me to not learn the craft of academic writing properly. I realised that I found – and find – thinking about art and artists intriguing, inspirational and even somehow soothing.

Yoko Ono, Doors and Sky Puddles, MCA Sydney, 2011.

I was also convinced, right from the beginning, that my thesis would be something to do with Indigenous art, which just goes to show that there are no absolutes, because somewhat to my chagrin at the time, that was not my best semester. My best semester, to my astonishment, was in Japanese art, a subject about which I knew nothing, or even less than nothing. However, I’d written an essay on the work of Yayoi Kusama, and Kusama I did love, although at the time I really did not think of her as a Japanese artist. To my mind she was a contemporary and conceptual artist, and a Japanese artist only slightly, if at all. It was my tutor, and later supervisor, Dr Jennifer Harris, who introduced me to the notion of kijin, the rich vein of eccentricity in Japanese art, which embraces all those Japanese artists who have chosen the Way of the Artist above all else. When I’d been studying for my essay on Kusama, I’d also researched some of Yoko Ono’s installations and conceptual art; I realised that she too, fitted the kijin notion. And of course, as soon as I delved into the research I discovered that both these artists’ work contain, in their different ways, a rich vein of Japanese tradition. Their works and careers have not come out of a Western-based art practice, however well-known they both maybe in the West, at its core their work has an Eastern sensibility.

Yayoi Kusama, Wanderlust Pumpkin on Naoshima Island.

If anybody had told me before I started that a) the process would be as enjoyable as it has been and b) that I would follow the White Rabbit down into a burrow of Japanese art history, overlain with an intensely complex conceptual and contemporary layer, I would have been taken aback.

Something happened to me during the three years of study. I realised that I wasn’t stupid, that I could embrace academic writing and enjoy it, and that learning was almost literally giving me back my love and enthusiasm for life. So if you have a desire to learn – here’s my advice, give into it. You never know where it might take you.

Mysterious are the ways of the White Rabbit, but long may he lead us on our quests for enlightenment, for learning and for enrichment.

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Princesses need lots of mattresses, and lots of toys…illustration Edmund Dulac, 1911

Keeping a teenage girl’s room tidy is no easy task, writes Candida Baker,  of her constant battle to minimize the contents of her daughter’s bedroom.

It was the pile of flour that did me in.

I had decided that it was about time that the Princess’s room had a jolly good cleanup, and it was one-step forward two steps back as she clung onto every little item and every outgrown piece of clothing.

But when I came across a pile of what looked like a burst balloon and flour, I naturally reached for the dustpan and brush.

“No!” came the anguished shriek. “Don’t clear that up, that’s my memory.”

(Actually I think she’d got it wrong because in fact that’s what MY memory looks like, but that’s another story.)

It turned out that the pile had in fact once been a toy made of a balloon and flour, bought for her by her Dad at the Fremantle markets in Perth and the Princess was loathe to part with it, despite its obvious ill-health.

This would have made more sense if it wasn’t for the fact that since then she’s had several more of these toys, including a brand-new shiny one bought only a few weeks ago by her mother from, yes, the Fremantle markets in Perth.

I forcibly ejected her from the bedroom, shut myself in and set to work.

Several hours and six full garbage bags later I emerged triumphant, having found several surfaces including her bed, the floor and the ceiling, all of which are useful in a room.

I then suggested that perhaps we could just maybe work our way through the several thousand books in the shelves and give just maybe a few of perhaps the Spot books for instance, to our next door neighbour’s three-year old daughter.

Let’s just say the idea went down like a lead balloon, or even like a burst balloon with flour in it. After at least an hour’s haggling, the Princess had agreed to graciously part (but only because I wanted it for my book shelves) with a very large book entitled Bundjalung Country, and an art book of Australian print-maker Barbara Hanrahan’s work, full of drawings of very explicit female body parts which had somehow made its way into her book shelves and also came back to mine.

The two servants, namely myself and the Princess’s friend from over the road begged her to reconsider, and after a period of time she agreed that perhaps her small friend could receive Angelina’s Christmas (because the Princess had two copies of it so even she couldn’t miss it), a copy of Postman Pat (because the Princess had never liked it) and some Spot books because the servants insisted.

In the end the Princess loved her new-looking room, with its tidy shelves and dusted surfaces – not to mention all the space, because, as she said, “now we’ve got rid of so much stuff, Mum, there’s room for lots more things.”  Oh well another year, another cleanup, and a few more floury memory piles (and that’s just mine).

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