Authors online
Cover reproduced with kind permission of Walker Books Pty Ltd.
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Authors online: Term 1, Weeks 6 and 7, 2 March – 13 March
Nadia Wheatley and Matt Ottley, two of the authors of the featured rap texts, will be available online during the rap to answer your questions. View student worksheets and teacher’s guide.
Nadia Wheatley: week of 2 March 2009, Week 6 Term 1
Matt Ottley: week of 9 March 2009, Week 7 Term 1
Blog task: questions for authors
The Planning and programming activities will help you prepare your questions, which should focus on ways in which elements of the rap text by the author help develop our understanding of the concept of belonging. This is an opportunity to apply the knowledge you have gained from participating in the rap so far.
Video conference (for NSW government schools)
A video conference with Jeannie Baker will occur on 4 March, from 10.30 -11.30 am. Registrations for this conference were finalised on 27 February.
Go to Comments or Leave a reply at the bottom of this page to post your questions and comments to Nadia Wheatley and Matt Ottley. You will need to log in, post your question or comment and wait for moderation.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:12 am
The cyclic nature of My Place is suggestive of both the life cycle and old fashioned story telling. We were struck by the fact that all the ‘characters’ in the text are pre-pubescent children. Do these things connect in that young people often feel a strong sense of belonging to place, especially at that time when they are between childhood and puberty and they are able to see with clarity and emotion the pleasure they feel in belonging?
February 26th, 2009 at 10:18 am
This book presents rather like a school project which is appealing but what interested us is the backwards narrative. This allows the final lines to be “For ever and ever.” Is there a suggestion here that belonging is more important to, or for, Indigenous people? That this connection, which others feel to place, house, Aboriginal people feel to the actual land? We are interested in the idea of place as a connection with The Crucible where we feel the part played by place is equally important as the part played by belonging to group.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Welcome bloggers
This week you have the opportunity to ask our online author, Nadia Wheatley, questions about aspects of Belonging or Alienation in My Place. Feel free to make your questions as small or large as you wish. Many others will be sure to have thought along the same lines and our blog readers will be happy that you asked…
Welcome also, to Nadia, we thank you for making yourself available to assist HSC students with their Area of Study!
Cheers
Lizzie
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Nadia
Hi – it’s Kisuke here! What inspired you originally to do an accurate timeline in reverse?
Cheers
Kisuke
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Nadia – Thanks for coming online to answer our questions! Was the last page represented by the colours of the Aboriginal flag or suggestive of Aboriginal colours?
Miitiianah
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Nadia – welcome to this blog. You have obviously done a lot of historical research for this book – have you actually looked in original colonial documents or in people’s journals to match their writing styles to writing styles of each time period?
Lasi
March 4th, 2009 at 8:23 am
Hi to you all,
I have never done something like this before, so I don’t know if I am meant to write one long letter to you all, or if there is some way of writing separate answers. It’s probably easiest if I begin with a description of how and why I got the idea for the book, and then I’ll go on to some specific questions…
I usually get my idea for stories from place. Back in about 1980 I used to live near the Sydney suburb of St Peters, and on Sunday mornings I sometimes took my dog for a walk around the suburb’s empty streets and deserted brickpits, and along the waste land beside a filthy canal. When I realised that the water in the canal would once have been a creek, I started to imagine Aboriginal people living beside the fresh water for thousands and thousands of years.
Some time went by in my own life. As the year of 1988 approached, I became concerned about the kind of history that might be published in the Bicentenary. Would it simply tell the tale of Australians whose ancestors had came here from Britain since 1788? Or might it be possible to write something which included both a recognition of the land’s traditional owners, and also the historical role played by culturally diverse immigrants?
Then one night, as I sat doodling little maps just for fun, I found myself drawing the map that you can find on the first page of My Place, and writing the opening words that Laura says. Minutes later, I was drawing a picture of a girl sitting up in a tree and and I was writing the words that are now on the last page of the book. At that point, I realised that my idea had turned into a story.
Four days later, I sent my rough drafts to Donna. When she agreed to illustrate the book, I started to do the historical research necessary to use this tiny microcosm of Australia a kind of window into the history of the macrocosm.
NOW SOME SPECIFIC ANSWERS:
To 12eng 4: I am glad you picked up on the cyclic structure of the book. Even that first night, I thought of expressing Time shaped in a spiral unfolding forward or backwards. I used this symbol in the timeline of the new edition.
I don’t think that pre-pubescent children are alone in having a particularly strong sense of belonging to place. I think we all share this. It’s just that at times older people are too busy with other things to pay attention to it.
You also ask whether I think that belonging is more important to Aboriginal people. It is not up to me, as a non-Indigenous person, to comment on how Aboriginal people feel about things. However, you are right in pinpointing the strong Indigenous connection with LAND (as opposed to real estate or property). Look at Barangaroo’s opening words: ‘I belong to this place.’ Is this different from the other narrators saying ‘This is my place’? You might like to relate this to the Mabo Judgement or the Land Rights movement.
To KISUKE: I did the time in reverse because I had recently been working on a local history project over a whole term with children at a country school. I am not a teacher, so I had to invent my own curriculum. I decided that we would start with what we knew — ourselves — and work backwards through the stories of our grandparents to the tales of the first white settlers, and then we would research the history of the local Aboriginal people. It seemed to make sense to the students — and to me.
To MITLIANAH: Yes, when I did my first rough lead pencil sketch of the last page, I noted that it should be in the Aboriginal colours and the composition should, if possible, mirror the design of the flag. This was to stress the fact that we all walk on Aboriginal land, wherever we are. Also, this ties back to the flag that is mentioned in the first story. It highlights the cylical nature of the book.
To LASI: I did a lot of historical research about the people who lived in the real area where the book is set, and I read a lot of early journals. I also studied the Aboriginal history of the area, as revealed in archaeology, and in living memories. Sadly, we have very few pieces of writing by colonial children. So the style is my own. I felt that all 20 narrators had to have a fairly consistent voice, otherwise the book would end up like a chorus in which all the singers are singing in a different style — some jazz, some hip-hop, some opera etc.
I hope that answers most of your questions.
Talk to you again soon!
Best wishes,
Nadia
March 4th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Hallo there Nadia – I am a high school teacher and our class discussions about Belonging in the past have been concerned with some of the negative consequences of Belonging. Students have highlighted exclusivity, culture wars and racism as some of the “downsides” of membership in established groups. They have felt that ‘not belonging’ can actually be a positive way of asserting one’s individuality over the hold established by a dominant group. With some of these issues in mind:
Do you believe that as different communities over time dominate a particular geographical space, in establishing their particular sense of Belonging, do they necessarily exclude other cultures, values or beliefs?
Why the title ‘My’ [exclusive] place rather than ‘Our’ [inclusive] place?
What of the original custodians of the place?
Many thanks for this opportunity to blog our thoughts and to learn from you. It is very exciting to read your views – a real privilege to hear from an author about their work…
Eleana
March 5th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Hello Eleana and your students!
What interesting and complex ideas you are raising!
Before I go into my own thoughts, can I suggest that you all try to read the novel FALLING, by award-winning Belgian author Anne Provoost. It is a wonderful novel about an adolescent boy who, little by little, finds himself starting to belong to a neo-Nazi group in a small Belgian town where some refugees are due to arrive. The story wonderfully exemplifies the down side of belonging to a group, and shows how boredom and loneliness and a sense of inadequacy as well as peer pressure can cause a person to seek to merge into a pack.
So yes, on a political level, I agree that a thoughtless commitment or blind belonging to a group of people or a set of ideas can bring about terrible outcomes. From the Crusades and the Third Reich to the Cronulla Riots, we can see how people can get swept up into hysterical and intolerant and sometimes violent actions, through merging their individual identity into the mob. Perhaps the most terrible thing is that this sort of pack mentality seems to make people think that they do not have a responsibility for their own actions. (Remember the defence that war criminals always give: “I was only following orders.”)
On a personal level, I am not very good at belonging to groups. I don’t say this with any sense of moral superiority. Quite the opposite. It has often made my life difficult. From the day I entered kindergarten until my final year at school, I just didn’t know what I was meant to do in order to fit in to the gangs in the playground. Sure, I had friends, but I always felt I was a misfit. And I still do. This is perhaps one of the reasons I love books — reading them and writing them — because they are a solitary activity. As I get older, I feel increasingly comfortable with the sense of being a misfit, but of course I remember how painful this was when I was young.
Finally, being a misfit doesn’t exempt me from trying to play a role in my community. I live on the river that you’ll find in MY PLACE, and I am involved in a number of local environmental and community groups, concerned with trying to make the river valley cleaner and healthier and happier.
Having said all that, I need to point out that the book MY PLACE is primarily about belonging to PLACE. This is a very different thing from belonging to a group of people. I believe that having a sense of connectedness with the land under your feet is a vital requirement of the human condition. Increasingly, people in Western society seem to live in their brains, or in the bits of equipment attached to their brains (computers; ipods; mobile phones etc). The body may get taken to the sports field or gym for a work-out, but for urban people there is little sense of connecting with the soil, the seasons, the land. As the cover of MY PLACE shows, this land is still there, under the thin skin of bitumen and buildings of the city.
…OK, so now some of you are going to say: “But people commit wars to defend PLACE.”
My reply is that those of us who are non-Indigenous need to try to understand the Aboriginal meaning of the word ‘Country’… a sense that is about the land itself and its ecology and conservation, rather than ‘Country’ in the national and political sense.
Does that go some way to answering your second question? In summary, I believe that we should not aim to “dominate” a space, but we should try to learn to live with the land and put the land first, and understand what the land is telling us. (eg It is now 220 years since 1788, and we are only just working out that the English word ‘drought’ is not appropriate to the way in which dry seasons work in this country!)
*****
In regard to these questions, can I suggest that you go to the website of Walker Books (the publishers of the new edition of MY PLACE). In the educational notes for the book there is a special set for Year 12, and in that there is an activity which would take about 5 minutes to complete. It is a set of circles, which can be filled in as a quick way of exploring personal ideas of Belonging (and not Belonging).
****
Why is the book called MY Place and not OUR Place?
Well, the reason goes back to the story I told at the beginning of this blog, about how years of historical and geographical imaginings came together one Sunday night as I sat on the couch doodling a map in an exercise book. The words that came into my head with the map were Laura’s words: ‘My name’s Laura. This is my place.’
I can tell you that I don’t usually have characters appearing from nowhere and speaking to me in this fashion! Indeed, in 35 years as a professional writer, this is the only time this has happened in quite this way. At that same instant, I knew the shape of the book, and I knew that the title was MY PLACE.
It doesn’t do to look a gift horse in the mouth!
*****
You ask: What of the original owners of the place?
Well, they are still here. Despite the violence done to them by early settlers and the terrible devastation of the smallpox epidemic of 1789 (which killed about half the Indigenous population of the Sydney basin), the people survived. Many families regrouped at La Perouse, which is on the bay which you see in Barangaroo’s map. Others lived in the growing city, especially in the suburb of Redfern, which is just a little outside the map.
In the 1918 spread of the book, you see one of these people, who has served in the war.
Laura’s extended family could well have members from this local community which stayed in Sydney. However, her parents are representative of the many Aboriginal families who continue to come to the city, as many non-Indigenous country folk do, in order to follow opportunities for work, education etc.
*****
Thank you once again for your interesting questions.
Good luck!
Nadia
March 5th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Hallo Nadia
I have been given some questions from students at Chifley College Bidwill:
It is 20 years since you wrote My Place, what are your thoughts on society now? What would you show as the first illustration and piece of writing from a 2009 perspective?
Why did you choose to relate all the characters in the text, throughout generation to generation?
Could you explain why the canal and tree are such key features? What is the symbolism for you of family, feasts and pets?
Cheers
Lizzie
March 6th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Hi to Chifley College…
Thanks for taking part in the blog. I’ll take your questions in order…
1. You say: “It is 20 years since you wrote MY PLACE, what are your thoughts on society now? What would you show as the first illustration and piece of writing from a 2009 perspective?”
I have recently had to ‘update’ the story because there is a possibility that there might be a TV series of MY PLACE, and they want to start it in 2008.
Obviously, Laura still has to have first go. So I moved her to 2008. Then I made up a boy called Mohammed for 1998. He is Australian-born, as is his mother Emma, but his father originally came from Lebanon. And into 1988 I put Phuong, a girl who has recently arrived from Vietnam with her parents, to live with her cousin’s family.
As to my thoughts on changes to society since I first wrote the book, obviously a big one is our growing awareness of climate change. However, this knowledge would not make me wish to change the book in any way, because the story of the degradation of the environment is one of the major themes of the MY PLACE story.
If recognition of climate change is the biggest thing to happen in global history since 1988, the most significant changes to Australian history are to do with the Mabo judgement and the growing recognition of the need to say Sorry to Aboriginal people, and to make amends for their loss of land and language, and for taking their children.
Into the timeline of the new edition of MY PLACE (published last year) I included reference to Mabo and Wik and the Prime Minister’s Sorry speech in February 2008. However, I think the first and last spreads of the book always acknowledged the fact that we all live on Aboriginal land. Certainly, the book always intended to convey this message.
Maybe, if I were writing the book now, I would make Laura’s immediate family locals, rather than people who have come from Bourke. I touched on this in an answer I wrote yesterday. However, it is also important to show that some Aboriginal people from country areas move to the city, just as other people come to the ‘place’ of the book from across the sea.
2. You ask: “Why did you choose to relate all the characters in the text, throughout generation to generation?”
Hmmmmm… I’m not sure I quite understand the question.
Stories of some of the families are related through generations. (eg Sam and Sarah and their children; the Owen family; the Muller/Miller family; the Irish family through 1928, 1938 and 1948; the Greek family in 1958, 1968, 1978.)
However, some families appear for only one decade. (eg Benjamin Franklin; Rowley; Victoria.)
That’s just how settlement happens. Some people stay on and on, and others come and go.
3. “Could you explain why the canal and tree are such key features? What is the symbolism for you of family, feasts and pets?”
OK… I could write pages here about the importance of the structure of this book.
Essentially, with a number of big things (time; history; narrators; main characters) changing on every spread (double page), I felt the need to make a clear and rhythmic repetitive pattern out of certain other elements. Therefore, on every spread there is a family; a reference to the narrator doing something in the big tree and at the canal/creek; a pet; a celebration of community; and — last but not least — the map.
Two of these things — the tree and the creek/canal — work both literally and metaphorically (as symbols). You can work out for yourself what they might mean in regard to notions of life, renewal, food, cleansing etc. (It is important that the tree has bush tucker on it, rather than being — say — a gum tree. It is vital that the creek is fresh water, rather than part of the tidal estuary.)
Family is obviously important, not just as the source of shelter and food for the child-narrators, but as part of the narrators’ identity. By the time people are your age, they are sometimes starting to separate from family, and want to identify as individuals. But children up to the age of about 11 often describe themselves in terms of their family.
Pets are part of the story because they are a way for the characters to connect with nature, even in the city. Also, we all have times when we feel at odds with friends and family, and it’s good to stroke the dog or even talk to the silkworms.
The celebrations… Even in the darkest times, many people do seem to find cause to celebrate something.
The celebrations in the book are not necessarily big festive events. Look at the celebration in 1838, when Davey and his mum talk about Davey’s dead father, Sam. Although this is a private family event, some of the celebrations are ways for me to show how the characters join with their community.
Back to your query about changes since 1988, I would say that one sad change in Australian society since I was a child is the way that urban people now often do not know their neighbours, and have little or no sense of community.
When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, children used to play in the street (or at least on the footpath), and women used to talk over fences. Men also used to know the other men of the street. I was interested recently to see some sort of government initiative for something called (I think) Neighbours’ Day, encouraging people to go out and meet a neighbour. It’s a good idea, but I find it sad that people need the government to tell them to be friendly.
I am happy to know all my neighbours. We all have each others’ phone numbers, and know that we can rely on each other. It’s really nice to go out into the street and feel as if I am still at home.
********************
Best wishes,
Nadia
March 6th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Nadia – a huge thank you for your online presence this week!! It has been wonderful to read your ideas – what a privilege to hear from the author of a book I have always loved so much.
Your ideas will provide great assistance to HSC students, who will be able to browse this blog and revise key notions of Belonging before their exams.
Many thanks
Lizzie
March 7th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Hello Nadia and Rappers,
It has been absolutely fascinating to read the questions from students and teachers, and Nadia’s responses to them on this blog. It is wonderful to see how My Place has operated as a springboard for such a great range of thoughts and questions on belonging. I had hoped that questions and activities, set earlier in the Rap, would encourage students to interrogate the books closely in relation to notions of belong. Certainly, the questions asked here and Nadia’s very astute responses indicate a deepening understanding of the complex notions of belonging and its representation in texts.
Many thanks to Lizzie for the directions and encouragement, to Rappers for their strong engagement with the text, and particularly to Nadia for the extensive responses and gems of information that add a wealth of meaning to the understanding of My Place.
CS
March 7th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
A huge welcome to Matt Ottley who will be online this week to answer questions about his book Requiem for a Beast. If possible, make sure that you take the opportunity to listen to the music that Matt wrote as part of this project – so that you can experience every facet of this fascinating, intriguing work.
Thank you so much, Matt – and we look forward to hearing your perspectives and ideas.
Cheers
Lizzie
March 7th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Hallo there, Matt.
As a white Australian, why did you decide to tackle this situation?
Rhonda
March 7th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Zeinab here. Thanks for being available to answer our questions, Matt. Is your book based on a true story? Is the Aboriginal woman a real person? Do you know her?
Zeinab
March 7th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Good day, Matt, Flicka here – my real name is Felicity. How did you come up with this story – what inspired it?
Flicka
March 7th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Matt, I’m wondering how long it took you to complete the book? Did you do all the art work and writing by yourself – did you have help?
Becky
March 8th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Hi Nadia
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Your thoughts and comments have been really helpful. Your explanation about the different perceptions of Country and thus Place does get to the core of some of the issues raised in our discussions. Learning to be in harmony with our ‘country’ is obviously a very important aspect of belonging in a positive sense.
It is so useful to have a writer’s impressions. You have made many valuable points and I know my students will find them great stimulus for further discussion on this topic.
On behalf of the class, thank you.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Hi all,
Thanks for inviting me to participate Lizzie, I’m looking forward to the rap. My responses will be posted fairly late each day by eastern seaboard time, as Im in a remote community in WA all this week and I can’t get to working on the computer till evening times.
Hello Rhonda. As a white Australian I decided to tackle the issues canvased in Requiem for a Beast for a couple of reasons. One was, I guess, a deeply personal reason, and that was to assuage my own sense of guilt about not standing up to racism when I witnessed it in my early twenties. I worked as a stockman in some remote places in Queensland, and although the racism I witnessed was nothing physical, I did never-the-less turn away from it. I don’t believe there is ever forgivable racism, it’s all equally bad, but for reasons of my own well being I decided to ignore the vile things that were being said about Indigenous people by some of my workmates. This is something I feel a lot of ‘good’ people do because it is hard to stand up against one’s peers and tell them that you think what they are saying is wrong. I have since discovered, by some of the mail that has come through my website as a result of the controversy surrounding my book, that racism is still alive and well (’well’ being an ironic word to use here) in Australia. The other reason for writing the book and music is that the story of the Aboriginal elder telling her experiences of being taken from her family is about a friend of mine. Her name is Aunty Pauline and she encouraged me to write the book. There were many times I wanted to ditch the project, when it all seemed too hard, but she kept telling me that she believed in what I was doing, and urged me to keep going.
Hi Zeinab,
The second part of your question has been answered: yes, I do know the elder who’s story part two of the book is based upon. The story of the ‘boy’ is also based on fact. The boy’s story is my story. I’ve actually merged a few different experiences into the story I created for him. I was a stockman in far north Queensland and in central and southern Queensland, and various of my experiences from all these places are rolled into the boy’s story.
Hi Flicka,
Hopefully the last two entries will also cover your question. Although Requiem for a Beast is a fairly dark story, I hope it also conveys the beauty of the bush. I wanted to tell a story that captures the awesome scenery – the wide open country and majestic skies of this country.
Hi Becky,
The whole project took me about five years to complete, but I had about two years of consultations with the Bundjalung people before that. I was very fortunate to have been awarded grants from both the Literature Board and the Music Board of The Australia Council for the Arts to complete this project. The first thing I did was write the musical score. I was living near Byron Bay at the time, and part of my funding was to work with musicians from the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, so I spent the first six months of the project traveling back and forth between Byron and Perth. I then began work on the paintings, and shortly after that began writing the text. The only part of the project that is not mine is the Bundjalung songs on the CD.
Matt
March 10th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Hi there Matt
We have been very interested in trying to understand the complex issues about Belonging which your book raises. Could you tell us a bit about the aspects of Belonging which you wanted to explore? As well, we wanted to ask you these questions:
To what extent is Requiem for a Beast about belonging within one’s own psyche – confronting and making peace with personal fears?
Is this book something about understanding and atoning for the misdeeds of our forbears?
Is it in some way about belonging in a spiritual sense?
Can the ‘beast’ ever be defeated? Or merely calmed, suppressed, satiated?
Thanks so much – we look forward to hearing your thoughts….
Eleana, teacher at Davidson HS
March 10th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Hi Eleana,
Thanks for your great questions. For me, feeling like one belongs somewhere is one of the most important aspects, if not the most important aspect, of a sense of contentment and happiness in life. I believe that all aspects of belonging can be distilled into one form, and that’s the psychic sense of belonging. No matter how deeply connected a person feels to the land they live on, I believe his or her sense of belonging is felt to its fullest potential when that belonging is shared within a community. It is our connections with others that ultimately will give us a sense of true belonging.
For me Requiem for a Beast is very much about belonging within one’s own psyche. Until the Boy has dealt with his beast, his feelings of alienation from family, his powerful feelings of un-met needs in his relationship with his father, he won’t be able to ‘come home’ to wherever he belongs. He has traveled to the place of his father’s stories to try and find a connection with his father, and found that he doesn’t belong. In so doing he discovers that the path which will ultimately lead to his place of belonging is one that begins with him living his truths. He discovers that he needs to reveal the truth of his father’s story, that it is, as Pete (his fellow stockman) says, the sharing of stories, the real stories of one’s life, that leads to connection, to belonging. If one does not live one’s truths, whether they be about gender (being gay, for example) or politics, or belief systems, or whatever, I don’t believe one can ever really feel a sense of belonging. Sometimes the journey to that place of belonging can be traumatic because one’s truths are different to those around one.
I guess the book is about atoning for the misdeeds of forebears, but only in the sharing of the truth. I have faith that most people are compassionate in intention (when those intentions are not governed by wounding). and when the truth is revealed, atonement finds its way to the light. But it’s not an easy journey. Racism, for example, is a wound that takes generations to heal.
Is this a work about belonging in the spiritual sense? I wrestle with the notion of what the realm of the spiritual is. I’m genuinely unsure of what to say here. Perhaps the book is about belonging in the spiritual sense because the Boy feels that in the end he has to betray his father, someone he has,despite his anguished relationship with, a deep and abiding love for. The truth becomes more important than his father.
Yes, the beast can be defeated, or at least domesticated! The Boy is like Thesius in the story of the Minotaur. He goes into the labyrinth to battle with the beast, and like Thesius, finds his way out of the labyrinth via his love. Aridne gives a ball of string to Thesius so he can find his way back to her; the Boy finds a deep and abiding love for himself, and the world around him through facing the truth of his and his father’s lives. The image at the end of part three (the image reproduced on the back cover) shows the beast in the boys dream/vision connected to the Aboriginal child via a rope. In this way, the story of the beast is an allegory for the European attitude to Indigenous culture in Australia. The beast is what the invaders saw, an image that has carried on down the generations and been fed to the Boy by his father. In destroying the beast, the Boy will find his way back to the little girl, the human being behind the construct. (I hope I’m making sense here – it’s late and I’m worried the net will drop out).
My feeling is that the journey to belonging is one that begins with the facing of one’s truths. This also facilitates the acceptance of other people’s differences. It is also a journey. In my own life I’ve only ever felt like I’ve half belonged to any of the places I’ve lived. I have been a nomad of the world and my belonging has been with my tribe, the people I love and feel deeply connected to, and they are spread out all over the planet.
Cheers
Matt
March 11th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Hallo there Matt
Thanks so much for your ideas about belonging and the things which heal us – they are fascinating. I have some questions from Chifley College Bidwill Campus.
They wonder if you would agree that on the night on the bridge the Boy’s father was certainly affected by his fear of NOT belonging?
Could you walk us through some of your favourite frames / graphics? Some of us don’t know quite how you work your magic. For example, right at the beginning, with the scene approaching the school house – could you talk us through what you were trying to evoke across that double page spread?
Please could you choose another double page spread that is highly significant and help us to see it more fully?
Cheers
Lizzie
March 11th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Hi Lizzie and all at Chifley College,
It’s funny, but when I was creating Requiem for a Beast I wasn’t thinking about the word ‘belonging,’ and yet it is probably the most apt word I can think of now to describe what the book is about. That’s the wonderful thing about literature, and about the discussion of literature; our ideas can expand and grow, and even change, and hence our view of the world grows and expands and changes.
Yes, on the night on the bridge, the Boy’s father was most definitely affected by his fear of not belonging. Almost more important than food and shelter is our drive to be connected to other people. We will often ‘turn a blind eye’ to things our friends do and say because we so desperately don’t want to offend them and turn them against us. One of the loneliest experiences a person can have is to be shunned by his or her community. The Boy’s father is paralyzed by his fear of being rejected by his work mates, so doesn’t protest when one of them attacks the child on the bridge. The Boy’s father has obviously been deeply affected by his inaction though, as his memories of the event have plagued him for decades.
There are two major dream sequences in the book, and one that could be a dream, or could be a vision. This latter one happens when the Boy is knocked unconscious as he struggles to throw the bull. The first dream sequence is the graphic sequence at the beginning of the book. You know how the stuff of every-day life gets mixed up in our dreams, and often comes out in bizarre and surreal narratives? The Boy dreams he is on the horse he is to ride the next day during the station’s muster, and he comes across a big Brahman bull. He’s heard about this bull; it is famous on the station for being wild and for evading past musters.
Now, before I go on, I need to explain that the book, as you have probably worked out, doesn’t follow a chronological time line. The story actually begins at the start of part two, with the Boy arriving in town on the bus. As he wanders the streets of the town waiting to be collected by the manager of the station he is going to be working on (see if you can work out how all of that information is conveyed in this graphic sequence), he stops in at a talk being given by an indigenous elder in a small community hall. The woman speaking tells of her experiences of being taken from her family by the government when she was a little girl. As part of the talk she speaks of her husbands experiences too. She relates how his school teacher would leave the windows open in the school house so that the kids could dive out and escape whenever they heard an approaching car (in case it was officers of the crown coming to take them away).
Back to the first dream sequence: this is happening sometime after the Boy has heard the elder speak. He is now on the station, and has obviously begun his work there. The elder has had a profound effect on the Boy – fragments of her story have come back to him in his dream. Suddenly, in his dream, he finds himself in front of a school house. The school house has a bit of symbolism attached to it to. If you look closely at it, you see that it resembles a church. Often the places where children taken from their families to were missions, or run by missionaries.
Notice the first frame in this sequence. the word text ends in the words ’school house,’ which has been painted in as part of the illustration. I’m hoping that viewers will continue to ‘read’ the images like they would a word text.
Inside the school house the Boy finds an Aboriginal child sitting at a desk. Both he and the child hear a distant noise – perhaps a motor car. This is a reference to the elder’s story about her husband and his school teacher. When the child is thrown out of the window and told to run, we are perhaps getting fragments of this same story.
The man on the horse in the dream is wearing a strange horned mask. He is the faceless ‘authority,’ who has come to take the child away. He also has elements of the Minotaur about him. Look at the description of the Minotaur from the museum sequence in part three. The ancient Greeks always saw the Minotaur as a story about suppression and repression, and the monsters that can be created when societies either suppress people and ideas, or repress experiences without dealing with them. King Minos does the wrong thing by his gods, and Pasiphae’s desire for the bull is not dealt with properly, both things resulting in the beast, which Minos again doesn’t deal with, but buries in a labyrinth under the palace. When a society doesn’t deal with its monsters, it is the next generation – the young people – who suffer. Several young people have to be sacrificed to the Minotaur every few years to keep it subdued. The story of the Minotaur is one that has haunted the Boy since his child hood, perhaps because it reminds him of his own unhealed psychological wounds.
I’m being called for dinner so I must leave the computer right now, but I’ll write another posting later this evening to fully explore your questions lizzie
Cheers
Matt.
March 11th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Matt
This stuff is so interesting – can’t wait to hear your continuing thoughts on all this!
Lizzie
March 11th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Now,
Where was I. The second dream sequence is from part three. The Boy remembers, as he is following the bull, a dream he has recently had where one of his workmates, Rudy, turns into a beast. Rudy is an Aboriginal man, and is riding a bucking horse. He is afraid of the horse, afraid it is going to carry him away. He gradually morphs with the horse and together they become the beast. When we look at the beast, do we fell it is screaming out in rage or fear, or is it simply crying with grief? Perhaps one can listen to the music that goes with this part of the book, and see what responses one comes up with. Perhaps Rudy represents Aboriginal culture and people, being carried along on the white man’s beast, and has no control over his future (as, I believe, has been the case for many indigenous people in the past). This dream taps into the allegorical nature of the book. Rudy, as representing Aboriginal culture, becomes a fearsome beast, something utterly different from us… becomes a THEM. But then we are reminded of the tragedy of a society that creates the us’s and the thems. A woman approaches out of the desert and pleads for her lost child, and we see her life literally being shattered.
There is another spread I’d like to talk about, and that’s also in part three. The Boy remembers an incident from his childhood where he tried to gate-crash somebody’s birthday. He wanted to feel included in the social group at school, wanted to belong, so gave the boy whose birthday it was one of his old toys – something he thought the boy might want. On the opposite side of this spread we see the Boy’s father giving one of his friends something he thinks he wants in order to feel a sense of belonging with his friend. The father is not condemning his friends racist statement. For me this is like giving a gift, a gift of acceptance. This, I believe is one of the powerful ways in which racism works. Because we don’t want to feel alienated from our friends, we won’t stand up to things they say that at a deep level we may feel uncomfortable with. Both father and son are giving something away, albeit very different things, but both for the sake of feeling accepted.
I hope that’s not too confusing. Please let me know if I need to expand on these issues.
As a complete aside, but one that is quite wonderful, I’d just like to share a strange coincidence. My grandfather was a drover, and later in life a novelist. One of his most famous books is called By the Sand Hills of Yamboorah. I’m ashamed to say that I’d never read any of my grand father’s books until I was asked to do a painting for the cover of a reprint of By the Sand Hills of Yamboorah. My Grand father had died by this time, and I never really knew him. I’d only met him once when I was a little kid, and we didn’t really talk with each other on that day. I had already written the text to Requiem for a Beast by the time I was asked to do the Yamboorah cover painting, so I was amazed to learn just what Yamboorah was about. I obviously had to read the book to know what to put on the cover, and I was astonished to understand that Yamboorah is an autobiographical book, and the main character is simply called ‘the Boy.’ My granddad and I seemed to have been on parallel tracks.
Matt
March 12th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Hello Matt & Rappers
The online dialogue about Requiem for a Beast has been absolutely amazing. So many questions and really detailed responses. This work has layers upon layers and works very well with notions of belonging.
I have just a quick question, Matt, in relation to the musical CD section of the work. Do you see the musical inclusion as an optional extended level to Requiem for a Beast or is it an integral part of your composition?
Many thanks for the wonderful, thought provoking dialogue on this profound verbal/audio/visual composition. I feel Requiem evokes a strong emotional, quite cathartic, response each time I read/listen/view it. Thank you, Matt, for creating such an awesome work of art.
CS
March 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Hi Matt
Thanks for answering my questions before. It IS pretty freaky that you and your grandfather were travelling on the same tracks!
How did you feel when you were writing this book? It has a lot of feeling in it. Do you in some way relate to the sadness in this story?
Zeinab
March 13th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Hi Matt
It’s Flicka here again. I know that you have written briefly above about what the minotaur symbolises for you. If you could explain a bit more about this, I would find it very helpful…
Cheers
Flicka
March 13th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Hi there Matt – thanks so much for sharing your ideas with us – it’s very interesting. I am interested in the relationship between the Boy and his father. Why does the Boy think that his father believes he has “become the beast.” Is this just the boy’s perception? Or something more meaningful? As well, the more you can tell me about the boy becoming a beast, the better!!!
Jerome
March 14th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Hi all,
Thanks Lizzie, Cathy and rappers for the opportunity to ‘talk’ with you about Requiem. It’s been a fascination and poignant week for me. I’ve just come home to Perth (which is why this response is late) after a week in the desert working at an Indigenous community called Karilundi. The kids there are from all over WA, and for some of them English is a second, third fourth, even sixth language. All of them have come from broken homes and broken communities, in a large part a result of the past Assimilation Policies. So for me to have been in that place, and thinking about your responses to Requiem, has been at times a sad, at times a wonderful and joyous experience, and an affirming one too.
The music, Cathy, was for me an integral part of the creative process because I’m synaesthetic. I see certain shapes and colours when I hear particular sounds. Often that’s how I write music – as a series of coloured shapes, which I then translate into conventional written music. So, the music for Requiem came first, and the cloudscapes for example, came from the shapes derived from the music. The images in my mind have the same rhythm as the music. Obviously that’s an extremely esoteric approach, and one that won’t necessarily mean anything to anyone else. I guess I intended the music as an extension of the mood and of the themes in the book. I modeled the whole work on the 12th century anonymous poem called Requiem, the work which was adopted by the Catholic church as part of its liturgy. I did so because I see the Requiem poem as being about the process of grief, and about coming to a place of peace and resolution. Many composers have written music to the original poem. I’ve used a version of the text that the Romantic composer Hector Berlioz used, though I’ve only used the Dies Irae section. Dies Irae literally means ‘Day of Wrath,’ and all four part titles in Requiem for a Beast come from this section of the Requiem Mass. I chose this section because it is both about accounting for the past, and coming to a place of reconciliation and resolution.
When I spoke to the Bundjalung elders about the form of the book, and explained the significance of the part titles, they started telling me about traditional stories and songs that have similar themes. One elder said, for example, ‘We have our Day of Wrath, or Day of Anger. That’s when we saw the first white man on a horse, and thought it was all the same beast, and we knew that it had come to change the world.’ The Bundjalung Nation has a song and a story about this event, which they regard as one of their traditional stories and songs, and it’s what we hear in the first movement. The same happens in the other movements. I discovered that in the religious sense, the Bundjalung and the Christian stories were at one level very similar, yet there has been an almighty cultural clash. I tried to show this by setting the Latin text in a completely different key to the Bundjalung material, yet the soprano’s melodies are all based on the Indigenous tunes. So, in one sense they are both singing the same tunes, but they actually create dissonance when they are together. I hope this makes sense.
For me, if the music is only an extension of the mood, or an aspect of the work to meditate on, then that’s wonderful, and that’s what it should be. If however, one wants to look deeper into the music, there are these other layers to it.
Hi Zeinab,
Yes, I suppose I do relate to the sadness in the book, but also the beauty. I wanted to write beautiful music, and paint beautiful images. For me personally, feeling sad about past wrongs on the social level is ok, as is feeling sad about personal wounding. As I’ve grown older, and felt like I’ve begun healing from my own wounds, I’ve felt the most incredible beauty coming emerging from that healing. If we face our own sadness, I believe we’re much better able to understand the sadness of others. That goes for joy and anger and all the other emotions too.
Hi Flicka,
When King Minos builds the Labyrinth, it’s to bury the Minotaur – the beast – out of sight. Rather than confronting the monster, and destroying it soon after it has come into existence, he has decided to try and ignore it. This is often what we do with traumatic problems – we bury them deep in our subconscious – and pretend that they are just not there. But like the Minotaur, those problems will eventually start calling from the depths – sending us disturbing thoughts, fretful sleep, sadness and anger, and what we sometimes do is simply feed the beast, like the king does with the Minotaur. This quietens it down for a while, but the monster will inevitably get hungry again. That’s when we do destructive things like lashing out at the world, or as the Boy does, getting further and further lost in his sadness and disturbing thoughts. The story of the Minotaur is symbolic at this level in Requiem for a Beast, and is also symbolic of the ‘beast’ that European attitudes constructed of Indigenous cultures. For me, at this level, Ariadne represents the human face behind the created ‘beast.’ In this sense we can be like Thesius in the Minotaur story, we can destroy the beast and follow the string back to the human being. In my own journeys of reconciliation with Indigenous culture, I’ve discovered again and again that I’ve had to throw out any preconceptions I’ve had about people or cultural practices. Sometimes I feel completely at sea about both my own European heritage, and Original Australian culture, and I reckon that’s a good place to be.
Hi Jerome
The Boy becoming the beast is one of those metaphorical images that needs only be about intense feeling if that’s all that you want to read into it. I believe that sometimes a work of art needs only to be felt, not necessarily analyzed. Having said that, it does, for me have a subtext (I can’t leave any image alone – I love analyzing paintings, photos etc!). In a convoluted way the Boy is like the voice of the beast the father has buried in himself. The father witnessed a terrible act when he was a young man, and has been haunted by the memory ever since. Perhaps because of this he has tried to dissuade his son from following in his footsteps. He wants no connection with his own past what-so-ever. But the Boy wants to travel back to the place of his father’s stories, and so the Boy becomes the voice of that beast – the memory and all the pain which this brings – within the father.
I think there has always been a loving and tender relationship between father and son, (hinted at by the father taking his son to the museum as a way of showing him that he thinks his son did the right thing by trying to give away one of his toys, and by the Boy wearing his father’s watch), but one that has been brutalised by the events of the father’s history and the Boy’s guilt. The Boy so wants to impress his father that he has cheated at his school exams, this further pushing him into a place of self loathing (P 62). In this sense the Boy does indeed feel like he has become a beast. I believe that we humans can, to a certain extent, become the things we try and bury. If we squash down feelings of anger, we can (not always, but can) become angry in destructive ways. Squashed feelings of sadness can manifest as on-going depression. I know I’m generalising here, and the individual psychologies of people are rich and complex, but it seems to be true of all people in all cultures as far as I’ve been able to see, that suppressed trauma eventually causes problems, not the least of which is a sense of belonging.
Cheers, and thanks
Matt
March 16th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Matt
It has been wonderful to read your ideas! I am so appreciative of your insights and the students will have gained so much from writing to and reading this blog. What a privilege to hear an author thinking aloud…
Many thanks
Lizzie
March 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Hi Matt,
Thanks so much for your involvement with the Authors online section of this Rap. I’m sure the students have benefitted greatly from your astute responses to the whole range of questions on Requiem for a Beast. Your answer to my question about the music is engrossing and will add yet another level to my appreciation of this multi-faceted text. The vast range of very different questions and your thoughtful responses are testament to the breadth and depth of Requiem for a Beast, which so skilfully synthesises cultures; eras; beliefs; iconic symbols; nature and humanity; musical, visual and written art forms; and no doubt so much more!
Thanks again
Pax vobiscum
Cathy S.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Thanks Lizzie and Cathy, Thanks all, it has been my pleasure,
Matt