an unexpected story... The Black Dress

I was given this book to read by a trusted colleague, who, on observing my work challenges, suggested I might relate to the description...a book about suffering and strength, religion and rebellion, love and anger. Many months later, I picked it up and started reading The Black Dress, by Pamela Freeman. It is a convincing story about Mary MacKillop, based on historical facts, of the eldest daughter of a Scottish immigrant catholic family in the mid 1800's. Alexander MacKillop left Scotland to join the seminary in Rome, but opted instead to become a god-fearing farmer in country Victoria, alongside his well educated wife Flora, who grew up in the foothills of the highest mountain in Scotland. We experience life from the perspective of Marie Ellen who experiences her father's educational aspirations while also feeling abandoned as he leaves the family and generally opts out of his paternal responsibilities. She experiences her mother's fatalistic 'god will provide' acceptance of their resultant poverty and as a reader we also have an insight into her personal anger, which would never have been appropriate at that time. The underlying question is the extent to which she can ultimately forgive her father, while carrying forward his religious fervour for her own life as an unconventional nun. Mary was clearly an independent thinker whose actions have had a lasting impact on rural children's education in Australia.

walking across the Sahara with Paula Constant

Why would an Australian woman walk across the Sahara with camels? The question was forming while I listened to Paula Constant in a segment of the Ubud Writer's Festival titled Incredible Journeys. She did not really answer my question in that session, but I did enjoy her style of story telling sufficiently to buy her book simply titled Sahara. Having walked more than 3,000 miles from Trafalgar Square to Morocco, Paula starts this adventure at the western edge of the Sahara, with her husband Gary, planning to walk from the western coast to Egypt in the east. Initially the book is quite self-indulgent, but in a way, it has to be, because the decision making behind this adventure is not always logical or linear. However, Paula's honesty, careful descriptions and self-analysis are compelling.

She writes with amazing clarity and compassion about the people of the Sahara and compares cultures between the original Saharawi nomads, Arabs, Bedouin and Touareg, and especially between men and women. I really enjoyed beginning to understand the racial and tribal connections and the importance of the infamous tea ceremony. Paula hires local nomadic guides, initially to teach her about walking with camels and later to navigate the route and languages.

However, the selection and choice of guides is quite challenging, while offering her and the reader amazing geographical and cultural insights. The Sahara is really more than the barren sand dunes we all visualise. She walks through the countries of Morocco, Mauritania, Mali and finally Niger, where she had to terminate her journey for political and health reasons.

The story is ultimately one of Paula's struggle to address her innermost demons and take control of her journey, her camels, and the men she hires to guide her through the romantic "big empty" desert. Early on in the trek, her husband leaves and the dynamics change quite dramatically. She writes honestly of her physical, emotional and spiritual journey; sharing both her courageous and naive decisions. She describes the challenges of hidden landmines, political bureaucracy, extreme weather, bandits and corruption without complaint or dramatic exaggeration as these are the tools for her own self discovery. It is clear that she is not trying to be a super-hero, but just testing her abilities to their limits. Her adventure is strangely believable and I found myself experiencing with her, emotions of joy, heartache, inspiration, and despair.

I also realised that she found her own threshold of sanity and realised the power of the human spirit in all its guises. However, she is much more courageous and capable that I ever could be! Finally, after finishing this book, I found 2 podcasts of Richard Fidler interviewing Paula about this journey and a TEDx talk 'The Power of Enough' where Paula shares her profound insights and acceptance of herself. She acknowledges the simplicity of accepting that she is where she is supposed to be, and that she is enough just as she is. I am glad that I found this because I realised her story was not about success or achievement but the process we all go through in one way or another or trying to be the best we can, but ultimately settling for accepting and enjoying our own authenticity.

Just to be sure...finding the extraordinary in the ordinary

What I love about french movies is the detailed depiction of ordinary lives with such detail that they seem extraordinary Just To Be Sure is set in coastal villages of Brittany, and begins by contrasting a DNA test with a robot defusing WW2 bombs. Detonating bombs is a wonderful metaphor for the unexpected surprises throughout this film. Erwan Gourmelon, played by Belgian actor Francois Damiens is a middle-aged widower with a feisty daughter, Juliette (Alice de Lencquesaing), who is very pregnant. She won't identify the baby's father as it was conceived during a one-night stand, and she does not want to hold him responsible. So the first big surprise is that following DNA tests for Juliette to exclude a recessive form of cerebral palsy, Erwan finds out that he has no DNA match with his father! To list out every personal challenge and dilemma along the way and highlight how they are often resolved in an unexpected way would only minimise the beauty in the everyday scenes and the seeming coincidences. Suffice to say, Erwan discreetly sets out to learn about and to find his father, who happens to be an elderly and very endearing man. He also seeks to seduce the elusive doctor, Anna, until he finds out who she really is... Erwan also facilitates Juliette to accept her baby's father and while many loose ends are resolved, it does not necessarily end happily ever after.

aligned with...Things to Come

This is truly an escapist indulgent recognition of one woman's multiple midlife challenges. Because it is set in France, it is both believable and enjoyable in every aesthetic detail. We enter the world of intellectuals living in book lined apartments, with amazing linen clothing. This film, L'Avenir, translated as Things to come, has deservedly won the best director for Mia Hansen-Love at the 2016 Berlinale. It is an empowering film of the recreation of life from the pieces left in middle age...

Nathalie, played brilliantly by Isabelle Huppert, teaches philosophy to idealist and somewhat anarchistic Parisian teenagers. At home, she holds her 2 teenagers together with a distracted husband, and tends to her despairing drama queen mother. But her first bombshell reveals that her husband of 25 years is leaving her for a younger woman. She and Heinz are both philosophy teachers and books have been their bond; and the reason why she had thought he would always love her. "How naive of me," she reflects with resignation rather than bitterness.

Another challenge is brewing, in that her publishers drop her intellectual work from their list because she's neither young nor hip enough to suit their new marketing plan. And then her mother dies, through succumbing to the depression that has haunted her for years. Nathalie also realises that while she was once a radical, her students are challenging her bourgeoise life. She has to recognise that one of her star students has grown beyond her, to the point of being critical of what she stands for. She does not wallow in self-pity, but rather relies on her intellect in the midst of the ultimate unfairness around her. One of my favourite lines is “I’m lucky to be fulfilled intellectually — that’s reason enough to be happy”. Nathalie does not need to find another partner to be fulfilled, and is in fact very alone in many of the dark nights both literally and figuratively. Somehow, in her solitude, she finds her freedom, but without those she thought she might share it with. Finally, the film provides a sense of hope through her emotional limbo; “So long as we desire, we can do without happiness". Somehow she finds strength in her vulnerability. And in this french genre, it is so utterly believable and strangely enjoyable.

Nostalgic and questioning...the Sense of an Ending

This film questions our personal meaning of life by comparing our remembered past with the stories we shape from it. We enjoy a wonderful snapshot of contemporary London contrasted against memories of school and university life in the 60's. We are challenged to test the veracity of our remembered life story, with others' memories and external objects of verification. Does time tinge our memories? Do we ever fully understand the consequences of our earlier actions. The Sense of an Ending is based on the 2011 Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes. It contrasts how we live, with how we live to regret. The excellent British cast is led by Jim Broadbent (Tony Webster) and includes Charlotte Rampling (first love Veronica) and Harriet Walter (ex-wife Margaret). Tony and his friends first meet the new boy Adrian at their Etonian type school. In a history lesson Adrian responds with the films' guiding message “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation". Believing they would be friends for life, the boys navigate parties and girls and it is not long until we realise that Tony loses his first girlfriend Veronica, to Adrian. Tony’s current life alters when he learns that he has inherited Adrian's diary, as part of the inheritance of Veronica's mother! We follow him around London in search of the diary and he surprises his ex-wife Margaret with stories she has never heard. The only part of the diary he receives from Veronica is a spiteful letter he once wrote and Tony needs to unravel various incidents from long ago. Finally, as he becomes a grandfather, he realises the importance of valuing what he has, in his ex wife, daughter and grandson.

Helen Garner's The first stone - over 20 years later

I was living in England when the event in 1992 occurred and was not that interested in reading this book when it was published in 1995. Now, more than 20 years on, I was handed the book, as an interesting read, by a trusted book clubber. I was therefore quite naive about what I was reading! The First Stone opens to the police interview of the Master of Ormond College, in relation to sexual harassment charges made by two students during a fairly jovial party after their valedictory dinner. It seems there was a delay before the girls reported the incident to the college and then the police. Despite being acquitted on two occasions, the Master resigned in disgrace without future career options. It seems that Helen was a critical observer to a highly charged and divisive situation - and she wanted to find out more about the motives of the key players. She wrote to the Master of Ormond, named by her as Colin Shepherd, and received some insights into his family life and career. She tried to interview the two girls, without success, and many people have since accused her of writing an anti-feminist story, and 20 years later, are still doing so! I am quite bemused because the story to me was so much more about power and class then merely gender. Ormond was a replica Oxbridge college that had recently modernised as a co-ed college. Sometimes Australians are more critical of class than the English themselves, who seem to accept it as part of life. While in many ways Australia is a classless society and there are multiple opportunities for self-improvement, there are still bastions of the English class system that are even more entrenched than in the motherland. Perhaps the University of Melbourne is one of them! So, for me, it seemed that Colin had tried too hard to be the congenial, compassionate and egalitarian Master in a hierarchical and historical class system. Somehow, the girls and their secret supporters fought a nasty and public battle where they moved around the classic victim's triangle, from victim to persecutor and then to rescuer. Along the way they gathered support from feminists, lawyers and the academic establishment. At no time, was there any sense to question the Master's actions apart from assumptions of evil intent. This is what has scared me the most. In gender and politics, there are many grey areas, where with some patience and compassion, individual behaviours can be understood, rather than escalated. I think Helen tried to bring this out in her book, by describing stories where most women have managed advances from men, that while flattering may have been unwanted. In many ways, the success of women is built upon their ability to do this with some respect for themselves and for the other person. Further, there is always a decision to escalate and that concerns me the most. Normally, in escalation we are seeking a higher level of moral conscience. Perhaps we are looking for exoneration for ourselves and punishment or at least acknowledgment by others. Helen and myself, as her reader, seem ignorant of when and why the decision to escalate was made. I think in trying to understand this, she was accused of being anti-feminist. But it seems to me, that the feminists were selling themselves out to the establishment and expecting the law to enact gender equality in one of the most inequitable corners of Australian civilisation. Garner reflectively questioned why the girls delayed their accusations, why they joined forces and whether they really had taken responsibility for their own behaviours. To me this seemed appropriate but to the feminists it was proclaimed outrageous. I really wonder whether the girls innocence and naivety was played by the feminist card. I saw a similarity to whistleblowers in office politics, where they try and use anti-bullying policies. In both situations, playing the victim, even with a sense of moral rightness, does not pay. No matter how civilised our society, we cannot legislate for fairness between sexes, classes or even managerial behaviours. Reading this book has really emphasised to me, the need for all players in any situation of real or perceived conflict, to carefully review their own contribution to the situation and to decide to act with power and responsibility. I accept that in some situations this is very difficult to do, because of significant power imbalances and altered perceptions. However, I wonder what would have happened if the girls had been coached to reflect on what had happened, facilitated to question the intention of their Master and then decided to behave differently.

Moonlight - a tale of sympathetic dichotomies

I cannot say that Moonlight was in my top 10 movies to see this year - but having won an Oscar for best picture, I thought it would be worth seeing - so I joined my usual arty meet up group on Sunday afternoon. I must admit that I was quite tired walking in, having read my book over lunch time and I was perhaps a bit too relaxed to fully get into this movie. It is quite slow and sometimes tedious as we meet the young black school boy Chiron, who is very introspective. He seems both vulnerable and shy and it takes us a while to begin to understand. His mother is seeking escape through drugs and it is not clear whether he is being bullied or that he just does not fit in. I am not sure that I would have picked up his sexuality issues if I did not know - he seemed genuinely unsure as a school boy and even a teenager about why he did not fit in with his friends. This may have become more difficult as he befriended Juan, his mother's drug dealer, and they had an almost father - son relationship. There were perhaps a few too many contradictions and inconsistencies, but I guess that might just be life as experienced by a fragile gay boy in the testosterone driven black drug scene. It is almost inevitable that he joined those who destroyed his mother's life, but the ending does hold out some hope, if you are feeling positively inspired....