Gurrumul and grief

I’m in a plane listening to Gurrumul’s music and crying. I’ve crossed America in the last three days for work, starting in Los Angeles, flying over the red dirt of Arizona to the green of Kansas City, Missouri, and now I’m en route to New York City.  I’m crying because I’m still grieving my mother’s death earlier this year – I didn’t do enough in her last days, I keep thinking. And I’m crying because Gurrumul’s music is so beautiful it often moves me to tears.

When I write books, music is central to the writing process, although the music itself doesn’t always relate directly to the book. For my last novel, I listened to Radiohead’s The Bends. The novel, In Falling Snow, is about a hospital staffed by women in World War I, a long way from ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. But five years ago, I was researching a non-fiction book about mothers and babies, and many women had told me the stories of their children’s births. Some were traumatic. A few were tragic. Almost all touched on the sacred. It made me reflect on motherhood and love, how much becoming a mother costs, how much it gives. The only music that came close to the experience was Gurrumul’s first album.

That first, self-titled album and now Rrakala are the work of former Yothu Yindi member Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu in collaboration with classically trained bass player Michael Hohnen. Hohnen went to the Northern Territory from Melbourne in 1996, seeking something the classical and contemporary bands he’d played in couldn’t offer him. He and long-time Territory community worker Mark Grose started their Skinnyfish recording label as a way of helping Aboriginal communities develop. They’ve recorded many artists, but neither was prepared for what happened with Gurrumul. The album blitzed awards, shot to the world stage, and put Gurrumul himself on the cover of Rolling Stone and in front of international audiences that have included the Queen and Obama.

Gurrumul doesn’t give interviews, preferring to speak through his music, Hohnen has said. In the vacuum – he didn’t even speak to his biographer Robert Hillman more than once or twice – it’s easy to construct a version of the musician from what’s known. Born blind, he grew up on Elcho Island off the northern tip of the Northern Territory, one of Australia’s most isolated communities. Left-handed, he learned to play a right-handed guitar upside down. While we may think of his life as hard, Hohnen says Gurrumul himself feels surrounded by family and friends who have always looked after him. In his native language, he gives us songs about a living rather than resuscitated culture. He sings of clouds and turtles, grief and love. He sings of mothers. It is music filled with hope.

I have friends who’ve lost mothers recently or are in the process of that long goodbye that is much of modern death. My mother lived on the other side of Australia, and in her last years, she couldn’t open her mouth properly to eat. Each time I visited, this person who’d been so central in my young life was smaller and smaller. She spent most of her final months in her own home, which is what she’d wanted, but I felt awful that her last days were spent in a hospice, even a good one. They couldn’t let her have a hot water bottle for her aching legs and constantly cold feet, because it was a health and safety risk. My mother was fiercely independent. The hot water bottle was such a small thing but it has remained with me, symbolic of all she had to give up. After she died, I wished I’d done more to help her, spent more time with her. And now, more than anything, I wish I still had a mum.

When he tours, Hohnen said recently, Gurrumul calls home and leaves the phone on the table in the background, so that he can hear what’s happening at home, and his family can hear what’s happening with him. “I was born blind, and I don’t know why. God knows why, because he loved me so.” Gurrumul’s songs speak to me of a life filled with love. No wonder his music moves me so deeply.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 26 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!

Spring

The next person who tells me my home town of Brisbane has no seasons should wake before dawn, which, although they may not have noticed, is an hour earlier than it was a couple of months back. They ought to listen to the pied butcherbird that starts around 4am in the top of a big tree in our front yard, seeking a mate through a gorgeous song “under the cover of dark” – he stops with the sun. Then there are the noisy miners, more noisy than minor at the moment. And the kookaburras, seeking a village to raise their chicks, evicted from everywhere by the over-populating miners. And soon, the brash parrots, chattering about their own chicks in the trees, and all the other birds that put spring in our spring.

Those seasonal naysayers should get on a bike and ride to the city gardens where they’ll be dive-bombed by magpies protecting their young, or watch scrub turkeys, crazed in every season but manic now when they must finish building their huge mounds or lose the chance of a family this year.

Brisbane definitely has seasons but perhaps it’s not surprising some visitors don’t notice. I checked out a couple of internet sites. The first said we get most of our rain in the winter. We do? The other did make the point that Brisbane “has got the four usual seasons” (and the unusual ones?). Instead of looking at the internet, the doubters ought to take a walk in my neighbourhood where native wisteria, callistemon and silky oak are raucous with colour. And hello, it’s hard to miss the jacarandas, which were green two months ago and are now purple.

I know they’re not native, but jacarandas signify late spring in Brisbane almost as surely as the temperature of the sea increasing by three degrees signifies the coming summer. Our most famous jacaranda, painted by Godfrey Rivers, was the first in Australia, the seed from South America planted in the botanic gardens by the canny Scottish horticulturalist Walter Hill in 1864, surviving until a 1979 cyclone. Ask anyone who grew up in Brisbane and they’ll have a story involving a jacaranda, whether it’s trashing their uni exams that one year, visits to New Farm park with a grandparent, or spending hours in a childhood treehouse. I’m glad Hill though to plant the non-native. If there’s a more beautiful sight than a jacaranda and silky oak in bloom side by side in the late afternoon skewed spring sunshine, I don’t know what it is.

I spent a cold winter in Canada a few years back. We saw few creatures other than humans during those long monochrome days and nights. In the spring, our friends took us birdwatching. We saw some wonderful birds and the stories of their long journeys to reach us were astounding. But we stood around in the cold for a long time before we saw those few birds, and their calls, while lovely, were muted, nothing like the pure unbridled joy of the chorus that wakes me every morning at this time of year.

But if I could play the season doubters just one bird’s song that tells me spring is here, it probably wouldn’t be a local. Instead, I’d listen out for that herald of summer, a migrant himself as it happens, arriving at this time every year from New Guinea. The jet black koel is the bird you hear early morning and late afternoon, a call full of feeling, often prescient of a summer storm, a heartfelt “ko-el” over and over that some people hate. He’s already telling us what’s ahead, a long hot summer where the earth will bake, the grass will need cutting every week and there will be plenty of passion in the sky.

I love spring. Our sleeping jungle wakes suddenly and finds the world in love with itself. I know our trees don’t lose their leaves, and our winter hardly deserves the name, but the seasons are still different from each other, and all more recklessly alive than in other places. Spring is the most lively of them all. Bring on summer, it says. Bring it on.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 19 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!

Please drive more slowly around school children

When I was seventeen and first allowed to drive, I drove too fast. I was in half a dozen crashes, mostly single vehicle, before I realised I was driving beyond my ability, not to mention outside the bounds of safety. I didn’t kill anyone, and for this I am grateful. The reason I’m confessing my shameful driving history here is that I’m about to give a little lecture, something I promised myself I wouldn’t do in these pages, and before I start, I want to put on record that I’ve been in the bloody idiot camp when it comes to being in charge of a motor vehicle. And now, to the lecture.

I read recently that so many drivers are speeding in school zones the State Government is considering stiffer penalties for breaches. Over 300 drivers were clocked at between 70 and 80kph in 40kph-limited school zones in the last year in Queensland, and 43 drivers were clocked at over 80kph. While the seventeen-year-old me would be blithe in the face of these numbers, happily accelerating, the mother-of-an-eleven-year-old me finds them hard to believe. Surely not, I think, not around a school where on any day I might see six year olds on scooters bunny-hopping from the footpath to the gutter, toddlers running suddenly, unexpectedly out on to the road, my son and his buddies so unaware of cars they cavort down the street throwing a ball.

I worked on a review of school transport safety some years back, and one of the more gruesome pieces of research we looked at related to speed and the likelihood of fatal injury when it comes to hitting pedestrians. In summary, when you drive even a little faster, you become much more likely to kill the pedestrian you hit. At 30kph, it’s five per cent likely. At 50kph – a speed 100 drivers a day are caught doing in school zones – the likelihood increases sharply, to 40 per cent. At 70kph, the speed one driver a week is caught travelling in school zones, you are 80 per cent likely to kill a pedestrian you hit, and at 80kph, the speed 43 drivers were caught travelling, it’s almost 100 per cent. If you think you can stop in time when a child does something unexpected, as children will do no matter what their parents and teachers tell them, you’re wrong. You can’t stop. You can’t even slow down. Maybe you were rushing somewhere important, maybe you arrived on time, but it’s dumb luck that you weren’t the person who met the six year old on the scooter, the toddler on foot, the ten year old who chased a ball, you weren’t the one who’ll have to live the rest of life, knowing.

When I was in primary school, an older brother of one of the kids in my class used to pick his younger siblings up in the afternoon. There were no school speed limits in those days. Cars came into school grounds. Three o'clock was crazy, dangerous, although none of us knew it. The kids in my class, including me, thought the big brother was really someone, driving a car like a grownup. He had a thatch of blond hair and big hands and he drove a light blue Holden Kingswood. One rainy day, he hit and killed a grade 1 boy. As an adult, I’ve often thought of him, that big blond boy, how his life must have turned on that one experience.

How do you tell someone else to take care? My younger self – the one who sped through stop signs with abandon – wouldn’t have listened to the bleating me now anyway, would have laughed in the face of the statistics on speed and death, would have assumed she was immune to harm and harming. I suspect drivers of any age who speed in school zones won’t read this or care, and maybe they don’t even realise what they risk. If stiffer penalties will work, I’m all for them. A short prison sentence might be a good start, together with an enormous fine and a naming in the paper with a very big photo. If that’s what it takes, I say, bring it on.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 12 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!