History is a relay of revolutions.

Bottom of the stairs looking up. Carruthers Building, St Johns Park, New Town. July 2010.

Last Friday I was on the [second] bus on the way to work – the Glenorchy via New Town Road – when I found myself rapidly approaching the emotional climax of the book I was reading. For those that don’t know (and you would be forgiven for not knowing of it), The Middle Parts of Fortune by the little known and long dead Australian expat Frederic Manning.

Men and war, war and men. That’s the plot. While this book is a record of experience on the Somme and Ancre fronts of World War One, there is far more waiting around than actual battle. Just like a real war.

That said; if you know anything about the Somme, you know that there will be blood. Perhaps the most striking thing about the book is the voices. Manning served in the ranks, a gentleman amongst men. The dialogue strikes one as ‘true’, and it is as if in recording the conversations of ‘the ordinary soldier’, it seems at times as if one is hearing the voices of ghosts.

The upper-middle classes had no lack of voice when it comes to the experience of the First World War. That is less so true for everybody else. It seemed that by the time it became ‘okay’ for ordinary people to speak about the war, they were dead. Most of us know them best through the mute, exhausted faces that stare out at us across time from black-and-white Great-War-era photographs.

That is what makes Manning's novel so special to me. Published in a limited edition during 1929, he captures their voice. The book gives the reader an atypical and vivid indication of what trench life and fighting felt like from the viewpoint of people that we might actually be able to relate to (being from such stock myself). More importantly, the book delivers some idea of the emotional and physical costs of battle. It explores the ways that men related to each other and to their superiors. As a reader, it takes it out of you.

But the point of the post is not to inform you of this most excellent book. The point was to regale you with a tale.

There is me on the morning bus to Glenorchy (although getting off in New Town), filled to the brim with school kids, reading this book. So I get to the real kick in the guts, the emotional and literal climax, and I’m welling up.

Fair dinkum, I thought “I’m not sure that I want to start bawling in front of all these people”, and set the bugger aside and looked out the window until I could get off and finish the chapter.

That’s the sign of a decent read.

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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