Three parts as excerpts from a memoir manuscript

Part 1 — The Marker

Proem

I thought I had killed the poem, over and again as I attempted to make it.
Jersey cattle, too fine for bush pasture, and in time lost, unmilked and bellowing,
were tangled in broken fences, where neighbours shot them.
Years later, chimney smoke was blue promise over a rusted iron roof,
but his jerry-built pigsty fence didn’t hold, and sows scrabbling on tin
knocked my pregnant mother over for scraps, hooves on the belly that held me.

Infarcted afterbirth. For what? Quick money in pork.
No blood at least, not to see. And the cloth she used to clean herself (I now provide)
had traces of kerosene.
Kerosene tins were useful, to carry slops, to lug creek water heated on a wood stove.

He once saw a man hanging from a willow by that creek,
I have his hand bloodied by cutty rush, reaching blind, to be sure.
A man known from the war.
He is still there, isn’t he? In that absence under water: part sky floating, part shadow.
Trauma and silence proceed from ways the mind self-shields,
ridding violent affect, to preserve a constant state.
His voice flat in mumbles seems explained by that.

The forgetful snow of TV static: Current affairs, Line-Up. Warhol was right.
Us taken-away-kids all legs and elbows, teeth missing here and there (part creek water legacy)
in a West Coast summer puddle by the Ring River bridge,
filmed to show the hardship of a prolonged miners’ strike.
I don’t think any of us saw that other news report, sometime in the 1970s,
of his hundreds of sick, starved animals, mercy-culled by the RSPCA and police,
on TV news two nights running.
I later met the retired sergeant who oversaw that. The worst experience of his career.
Pitiful as much for the man as for the animals shot.

Blame parsed makes sour grammar. His letters were possibly burned
(I describe those paper coals in another setting), or anyway lost, unread.
Our mother’s first-born of eight (seven living), everyone’s half-brother and no man’s son,
went back to the farm after a falling out of many.
‘I’m not your father,’ he was told.
I have him tripping on acid in rain, wanting to shoot dogs chained to trees, and unable,
before, in reality, he fled in the old man’s pale blue Volkswagen, stuck in second gear.

That constant state. It’s where all the years go—out of sight,
unspoken, down the Channel Highway. Lost to a step name and sibling whispers
that our father was dead or mad, or both. All and neither true.
The ancient, peopled archipelago, his prison island, kept in time stolen.
Ambivalence seeks faith in the faithless: There were moments,
in never-easy visits after meeting him,
that I imagined an ideal of his seclusion. A shelter.
The marker of a story never found by walking over broken glass.

Stones carted and buried with plastic bags for a failed creek dam.
Stones of violence lodged in a psyche.
All gone. Leaving stones. Stones in the gravel of Auschwitz underfoot.
A limbo after strokes, kept nil-by-mouth eleven days was his final silence,
conscious enough to have calmed when I was there to help clean him.
I heard the Cheyne-Stokes breathing, but not his last breath.
In eulogy I evoked the boy, not yet a child soldier,
from his self-schadenfreude recount, in that same soft, accented voice,
of cycling on a meadow lane into ice like glass unseen.

His ashes, first left behind, and then then posted, were carried back later,
and in the company of my eldest sister and her partner,
on a hilltop on his land, past the place in forest where a linden grew,
cast to moss, with no words left to utter, near a devil-chewed trespass sign.
The telephone is buried in this story because he never had one.
The poem is a book face down, a spine and bird wings
            that from such hurt and indelicate objects, hope and beauty take flight.

Part 2 — On absence and imaginary friends

Essay fragment

It was one of the earliest philosophers, Heraclites, who gave us that adage that you can’t step in the same river twice. Not only has the river moved on, but you have too, maybe in more ways than you realise. Our memories too are constantly reimagined.

When encountering a friend after many years for instance, in the smallest almost imperceptible moment the person you once knew is gone. Knowing is already proximate, that old friend is there with you — but years evaporate. And you might even experience this encounter in discomfort; find yourself falling back on a former idiom of yourself once expressed, and one with which you may or may not be at ease (some dodgy behaviour maybe) and it will depend upon your temperament how you deal with all that. Yet in an equally small moment, also in conscious and unconscious ways, the now aged, differently experienced person fills the void and from genuine affection or just with grace, you both re-adjust. New and old change places in a trick upon the ‘self’ that seems natural, and unremarkable. The old memory is part of a palimpsest of the person and your connection to them is renewed. We experience this many times over in making and remaking our ‘selves’. The workings of it are intriguing, yet we often taken for granted. We can even be taken aback if an error of memory, a fiction, is corrected.

Imagine as another instance, how a childhood place may seem so much smaller going back. The distance between the old pear tree and the creek puddled by a willow, where a cow called Daisy got stuck in mud and died, seemed so far distant to a seven year old girl whose world it once was (a memory borrowed from my oldest sister, before our mother, with another man’s baby, left our father with us kids piled into the other man’s car to escape to the wild west coast of Tasmania). The readjustments are different. For my sister back there for the first time, just for a moment might have glimpsed the child she was and forgiven her, or something like that. Something like forgiveness. I’m not sure what that thing is, but I think it might feel very real. Not so much contained by us, but tentatively held. A little love and sadness might detach and dissipate in a sigh, only to be inhaled in the next breath, just as it may have done when you re-encountered that old friend, if you had loved them even a little.

All in the beat of the heart. Given how much we experience in a life of say, two billion heart beats, if we are lucky, how many beats fall on such moments?

It’s complicated, and rich enough.

Now imagine that there are facts of your time growing up, out there and known to the world, that for some reason are absent from your memory. Not amnesia, at least not fully, but as if something had gently wiped parts of your childhood and rubbed out appearances of one person. A person with your story, around the same age and who grew up in the same small, isolated town at the same time as you.

Imagine now that you the reader and I change places, and we go back to a district school, once one of the roughest schools in Tasmania, in the remote west coast mining town of Rosebery, in 1967 and you are in the first year of school, in Tasmania, Kindergarten. Whatever it was that displeased your teacher (it was a different age then) earned you a little rap on the knuckles with a pencil. When you cried, she had you on her knee for quite a while as she supervised the other kids doing whatever it was that they were doing. If I told you the other kids were playing with coloured wooden blocks you might want to believe me. I might even come to believe it myself after time.

Was that other little boy, the one with your story, there? Did he feel a bit upset, as other kids might have done, when you cried? The blocks are easier to invent.

Skip to Grade 3 and your teacher is Mrs Grundy and because you have had a hiccup and fallen behind in learning to read, she has you reading out loud to her at her desk while the other kids work quietly at theirs. You wonder if that child was in that same classroom with its tall, panelled windows overlooking the concrete playground.

Or was he there two years later when all the primary age pupils feature in a promotional film called Rosebery Ramble, made to attract much needed workers and families to the growing town? Kids are in the classroom singing along to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ with their teacher, when a jazz band appears in the playground outside those windows, and all-as-one, a bit rehearsed, with a rumble of wooden chair legs they rise from their desks and are next seen from outside, tumbling in laughter through school doors into sunshine, to follow the band, pied piper style, through Rosebery streets, to later wave farewell to the still-playing band at a rail siding. Were you and he both among them? It’s a low-resolution copy on YouTube and hard to tell and neither of the men in suits and ties behind the waving kids at that siding looks like his headmaster father.

In a mining and minerals boom the town and little school are growing. Beyond a concrete forecourt and two quadrangles, a second created by new buildings, it has only a gravel playground, bulldozed at the farthest, eastern side to the edge of button grass swamp that soaks through peat into the coke-coloured waters of the Stitt River. That kid may be somewhere in the playground. He is eight months older than you but could be in the same grade, with an April birthday you were packed off to school early and all your friends were always older than you. Likely he is with one or two of his little mates nearby, keeping a distance from the string of rougher boys whose older brothers had lined up, as reported of the oldest boy’s experience, to fight the headmaster’s son when the family arrived in town seven years before.

Let’s make the little brother your imaginary friend for now and nine years old. His older siblings are away at boarding school, his oldest sister is away at a teaching college in Launceston, and he has a younger sister at the school. He is by nature a bit introspective in a big, talkative, book-loving family where he hardly gets a word in, so possibly shy until in command of his surroundings, and then prone to exaggeration, even making stuff up when he gets going. As the second youngest child of six children, he is securely attached to his mother who reads him bedtime stories. He loves playing outside and the line between books and life can blur. And he is loved by his father, the headmaster and a kindly man, according to your mother, from her having met him. His father was a man who was far from diminished by experiences of horror and humiliation in the second world war but granted instead humility and grace in ‘a reluctance to judge’, as described by the boy’s older brother in a memoir, a trait his children inherently understand. The kid has a sweet smile, with a lot of pride and mischief in it.

You smile sweetly too. A sometimes clingy, sensitive child (as that first teacher quickly discovered) your mother was pleasantly surprised when you ran off happily to play with other kids on your first day at school. And she tells you that in infant school all the teachers wanted to take you home with them.

You are one of seven kids, with five sisters and your brother nine years older, your mother’s first born to a Polish man she met in the Central Highlands as a teenager, has already left home. By years’ end you will have a baby sister, your mother is pregnant and your dad is hoping for a boy, and you have two younger half-sisters already at the school, in the infant block, which has its own playground, one in Grade 2 and one in Kindergarten and your next oldest sister is two years ahead of you in Grade 6, in the classroom closest to the headmaster’s office, while your oldest sister has been sent away to board (she still refers to it as having been banished) to attend Burnie High. More to the point of absence, you are the middle child yet youngest of the biological three from the German never-spoken-about, presumably dead or mad or both- father, your mother’s second (though de-facto) husband, all growing up in a small house rented for a token sum from the Electrolytic Zinc company that your dad works for as a semi-skilled labourer. And you call him dad, go by his name without question and love him, as healthy, resilient, ever adaptive children do. Your past in many ways is a secret, even to you. People in Rosebery only know you all by your dad’s family name.

Unlike you, the other boy does not have an impressive gold cap on one front tooth from its being chipped, nor many missing teeth, due to infant malnutrition, having had them removed in hospital under general anaesthetic. Though you may be wrong about all of that, and he did, you have learned somewhere, have profound hearing loss as a child, corrected by an operation at six. You are fairly sure in this fiction that the re-imagined boy might not have an underlying anxiousness, as you may have had, in coming from a ‘broken home’, with a stepfather and half siblings creating unspoken competitive tensions growing up (you sometimes shared the suspicion underlying your sister’s idea of being banished). The anxiety you possibly and unwittingly have (even if you don’t admit to it yet and remember that for you the reader, that this is only temporary, as is childhood, supposedly …) is buried anyway by a sheer optimism and love and nurture amidst the loud, high-pitched squabbling of a big family of mostly girls. To this day your closest friends are women.

A lot to process so far, I guess. But fairly ordinary really.

And you of course are not an ordinary reader. You have by now also read enough of the English paediatrician and psychoanalyst W D Winnicott to be across the tenets of attachment theory, the means by which, from our attachment to our first carer, the character of our attachment to people and subsequent patterns of intimacy and attachment are established in infancy (already referenced by security above, you noticed). You are also familiar with the work around trauma by Bessel Van Der Kholk, on the many ways we carry traumatic experience, and how, from the title of his book, The Body Keeps the Score. So, you will also know what the implications may be of your having been squashed in the womb three weeks before birth (mother trampled by pigs on that rundown farm on the D’Entrecasteaux channel coast in southern Tasmania, three weeks before you were born inordinately small). And if birth itself isn’t trauma enough for us all, you were not breastfed, and possibly exposed to a lot of unhappiness in the first year of your life (possibly even postpartum depression, since you were a child conceived in an attempt to save a failed marriage …), while skipping the crawling stage in learning to walk. Insecure attachment. Picture here an unsteady white-haired toddler reaching to touch table legs to stay standing in a farmhouse that has neither electricity nor running water (hard mineral creek water on the farm also apparently helps explain your teeth and those of your oldest sister).

That portrait may or may not explain many things, including serial monogamy from always choosing avoidant partners and those with absent fathers. It also might or might not explain, from not crawling and developing ‘turn out’ in leg muscles, how you could not have become a famous dancer in the Sydney Dance Company that people mistook you for over several years. Your stepfather mocking you for dancing and singing to the radio when little, put paid to that anyway. It does not of course completely explain the inability to write comedy like the New Zealander John Clark, also known as Fred Dag over the ditch, which your mother would have liked of you, you presumed, from her having repeatedly sent his books to you for birthdays after you left home.

There was after all something far from ordinary in growing up in such a remote and rugged place, and a lot of comedy. Grief and ambivalence often overlap. The British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in Being a Character: Psychanalysis and Self Experience has elucidated this complex and mixed-up aspect of experience and reimagined memory so well in coining the notion of ‘Psychic Genera’, an opposite of trauma (to simplify it a very great deal) that might cathect from all things good or bad around formative infant experience, and may have helped you evoke a positive, good-humoured sense of self. Maybe long before you read Nietzsche on the idea of embracing one’s own fate (Amor fati, in Latin, the love of your own fate), with suffering and loss being a part of that embrace in an extended way of being in the world, you already had, in your own way embraced something generative.

Rain makes you feel cosy from memories of shelter.

And you wonder if a part of your nature might derive from a stoicism, openness and generosity in people’s down to earth manner on the west coast, for all that was fucked up about the place (your siblings afterwards would generally refer to Rosebery as a shit hole they didn’t want to go back to). It’s called more ordinarily, optimism, or a relative perspective, thinking in many ways, and rightly, that you had a fortunate and even privileged upbringing, with electricity and hot and cold running water and were white and a boy. You had that love and nurture, the little sisters who adored you, the sacrifices made for you that you appreciated, an errant, troubled older half-brother as a kind of anti-model, and a book-loving mother, whose grandmother had ensured she went to a good school. There was a lot of puzzling in your childhood thoughts, always jotting down surprisingly deep little epigrams and questions which you rediscovered in a box of things left behind at one of your younger sisters houses on one homecoming, which has since, like so much else vanished.

There was also a lot of rain to wash things away on the west coast, much bucketing of rain, twelve imperial feet a year of rain, four meters, in drizzle, mizzle, mist and cloud, and sunshine too, enough in summer to melt bitumen and spark bushfires, when skinny-ribbed and sunburned you could plunge from a rope into the tannin black waters fed by the snow on craggy Mount Murchison’s peaks, at the Mackintosh river near Tullah, at a place now under the waters of a lake built for a hydroelectric scheme. The same craggy peaks viewed over the roofs of houses on a hill and forested foothills, from that school playground.

At one point you felt you had to leave it all behind and imagined that you could. But those images leave an imprint. The ghosts come knocking.

Part 3 — The buried telephone

Auto fiction

A cream plastic strip on the ground on the ridge line of a hill seemed out of place: rubbish so far away from buildings and people. When uncovered it was the curved top of a handset in leaf litter, which then revealed the coiled handset cord, caked in soil and decomposed leaves. The body of the telephone, with the dial of clear plastic when working that would have rotated around numbers, only revealed itself when kneeling and using a stick to scrape away a soil clod around it. When he was able to lift the body of the thing out it was stuck by the cord that once would’ve plugged into a wall, buried in the ground.

He dug around the cord to release it, being careful not to break it, and got so far with it that he had a metre of slack, the end still buried, and was able to stand with the phone, in the bush, on a hill overlooking a channel of water, held in that indent under the handset on the body of the phone by the slots for the bell speaker in the way one held a phone decades before, when you might carry the phone with you across the room. Unless the phone was fixed to the wall and then you would have to stretch the handset coil as far as it would go, near straightened, to be across the room, or behind the door in another room for privacy, looking out a window perhaps, with a view of bush and a body of water.

It was in thinking of that, of the bodily memory of using both hands to make a phone call, that had him lift the receiver of its cradle.

The familiar click and stuttering thrum of a dial tone threw him.

He thought it must be some fluke, against logic, of long stored energy in a capacitor or a coil in the phone that would quickly dissipate, but it continued. His response to the complete irrationality of this was to put the handset back in place. He put the phone on the ground and sat looking at it, as if to collect himself, to reconfigure reality. When he lifted the handset once more it was with some relief that it was silent, but not entirely relief, and not entirely silent. When he held it to his ear he heard a child’s voice, a high-pitched boy’s voice, distant yet intimate in a way that words cannot easily describe.

Hello?

His heart was racing now.

It might, if this was some imaginary circumstance, have been easy to imagine a first reflexive response, when hearing this child’s voice, to say ‘Hello’ in return, and ask … ‘who am I speaking to?’ like you might have done in the days when phones were communal and in dialling a home number you might never know which member of a family would answer, often a parent, and if an older parent, with a special telephone voice. But it could not happen like that because he knew the voice to be his own. His voice, as a child.

In the wrenching in that second of time he was flooded and completely overwhelmed with the most terrible heartbreak for time lost, for himself lost, as if every slight and hurt and pang of love and longing had burst inside, and panicked in this way he was more than speechless — he was paralysed and sweating with both fear and a strange sense of elation, as if he, as that so-vulnerable child, all nascent mystery, had returned and was with him now.

He hung up again yet hanging up on himself made it worse. He made a strange involuntary sound then, as much a bark as a sob, as if in great pain — his body a puppet of force greater than he, fell to the ground and lay in a foetal position, trembling.

After a time, he began to breathe more naturally, and to think again, his consciousness raised that way above that inner storm, to feel the ground under his hands and smell humous and eucalyptus bush around him, sensing all that was absurd and surreal in all this, seeing the shiver of breeze in leaves that brought him back to ground.

He stood then, to see again that view from the hill of a channel through trees, and a long island on the distant shore, from the sight of which the discovery of plastic had distracted him, but his trembling legs had him sit again on that ground by the unearthed phone.

He might also have dismissed all that had happened in those seconds as neurological, a small stroke perhaps, the knife-sharp specificity of it could help make the argument for some breach of the unconscious. He knew, as surely as he had ever known anything, the specific circumstance in which that one ‘Hello’ was spoken. It was 1966, his two older sisters beside him, and there was once a photograph of this very scene, but the reality of it relived was so keen as to have had him feel cold air on the child’s, on his, face, and to touch his face to be sure.

In the photograph he was closest to the camera and the three siblings were lined up parading toys, his sisters with their new prams and black dolls, and he with a toy telephone. It must have been Christmas. Their apron-wearing mother was in one corner of the image, an unflattering blur, coming around one corner of the tin clad mining company house in the mountain side village of Williamsford, a place that no longer exists, and her a ghost with a face washer in one hand. The story once attached to all that was fleeting, forgotten, competing with so many other stories that had spiralled out from it in an overwhelming second, and the only vaguely rational analogy he could now make, also electric, was the high voltage shock that had left his armed bruised as an apprentice and sent a large spanner flying across the room and clanging on the concrete of a substation floor.

One memory among thousands, that had thrown him to the ground.

It would have been the first Christmas since he and his sisters and the baby girl, the child of their new stepfather, and their elder half-brother, had come to live there. Swinging London, Vietnam, the Australian Prime Minister lost in surf, all the many things that would have been so far away from a four-year-old boy in a remote mining village on the side of a mountain, washed up as songs and news under the staticky reception on a wireless relaying the fading signal a faraway small-town station.

In this way, the feeling of 1966ness in the scene of the photograph was fleetingly so very specific — along with the state of the girls prams, which were not new, likely second hand, but their pride in them made them new, as with the black dolls too which were a fashion at the time, and it was vague otherwise, and began to fade so quickly as he sat there having it all return, yet wash away, like waves of the sea, above and under, head in hands now, just a cork in the ocean of it.

The idea that as a boy he heard someone’s breath, his own breath, on the handset of a toy telephone from decades in the future, and puzzled, said Hello, could not even have been thought, nor yet remembered. How quickly, when objects are given names and narrative, they are contained and the emotional content within, that latent storm of rage and love and loss, is hidden. Yet that single utterance had unhinged him and held it all open… the moment of that photograph, holding the toy phone to his ear, projecting later life on it in seeming to pretend to business, seemed such a small thing for all that had imploded in on it, like a galaxy of self we like to pretend does not exist. And the photographer absent.

Sitting for what must have been several minutes on damp ground, he began to think about what he might have said to himself as a boy in that moment, and he could think of nothing. Could think only that it would be betrayal to have spoken at all, breaking the sanctity of innocence, and that sense of sweet pain came back. Yet the dark matter of silence was in it too, that which had bound all those threads to the heart, and tugging at them, that had more dragged than threw him down, the very earth wanting him buried.

Sitting there, his heart still beating fast, every telephone number ever committed to memory, in a congruent involuntary feat, begged to be recalled, from a time when people did that, to be able to call family or friends from a phone box on the street, when people made time and went out of their way to do such things, without an omnipresent monitor in their pockets. And each thread in the cord of it all contained its own small anticipated world; in the grain of voice; in the background sounds of the phone network, suggesting distance; in that surprise, event after event of each call, from person after person, wanting to hear their voices again, their breath, little habits of syntax, in connection so powerful and ordinary, and each fell from his heart like a cascade in loss, yet at the same time with joy. The crackle on the line.

With one hand he touched the index finger of the other, which with a familiar sweep, might dial a phone. He watched ants around the souls of his boots, one carrying a leaf, imagining a million ants that might rebury that object. Others carried small specks, like ashes of bone.

He wanted, strangely, for that telephone to ring.

With eyes closed behind fingers, now breathing deeply and more slowly, and with that he felt a stillness of mind enough to lift his head and look about. And a sound came as comforting as the physical touch in a voice, but now within hands reach, in the chirp of a tiny, white-eyed finch, then another, then dozens of hyperactive finches, flitting from branch to branch, not seeing him for stillness, until in time they happily diminished and together had moved on with a flock of chirps growing distant.

It seemed that hours had passed, and not just hours, but days and weeks, a life in that fleeting harvest of finches taking so many memories away in fragments.

He placed the unearthed telephone back into the depression he had made in removing it from the ground and covered it up with the ground, so you might not have known it was there. Then came a silent readjustment on the cusp of thought, and with the snap of twigs underfoot.

© Linden Hyatt 2025