Living funerals

"Death is scary … but it doesn't have to be a sad, lonely place." - John Gilis

More here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-10/living-funerals-celebrating-a-life-and-acknowledging-death/103249754

Care in flight

Three times in the 5 months that we've been in Tea Tree Cottage we've heard the sound of the Westpac CareFlight helicopter descending nearby.

It's reassuring to think that this level of care is available to people living and working in regional areas when they need it. I always find myself saying a silent prayer for the sick or injured people it carries, those who operate it, and the people who will care for the patients when they arrive at a hospital.

Rodeo II

Rodeo

One hot spring afternoon we go to a nearby town to watch a charity rodeo.

With my liberal, citified, vegan/cruelty-free sensibilities, I'd naively managed to assume that all rodeo activities would be creature-friendly. I don't quite know what I'd imagined this would look like - the cattle being calmly petted, perhaps?

The reality was very different. I found it rough to the point of violence, and spent most of my time averting my eyes. But when I could bring myself to watch, I took photos: bearing witness to what I saw.

Coffee and scones

One of the greatest attractions of the country town where we found Tea Tree Cottage was the fact that one of my siblings and their children lived there.

Amid the jumble of working out what needs to be done to the house, priorities, and how to source everything that would be needed to do it up, we find time for family outings. A nearby coffee shop offers tables covered with white paper and a supply of pens and crayons with which to decorate it ... As well as excellent coffee and fresh scones.

Chaos

For the first few weeks of our tenure of Tea Tree Cottage, all is chaos and wonder. The internet takes a couple of weeks to connect, despite being organised weeks in advance, as there would be three of us working from home. 

It's our first taste of the patience and innovation that would be required while living in a tiny country town. Equipment that couldn't be found in town needed to be ordered online and would take at least a week or 10 days to arrive; the alternatives were typically driving a couple of hours to a larger town, a 7-hour return trip to Sydney, or waiting for the next visitor willing and able to bring supplies up with them.

A few days after the internet was finally up and running, my phone died with no notice. With it I lost all my first photos of the Cottage.

The Tea Tree Cottage Adventure

A few months ago we decided to throw caution to the wind and buy a little house in a small country town a few hours out of Sydney.

From the outside, the house doesn't look like much more than a glorified tin shed, being made almost entirely out of corrugated iron. Its little plot of land, just over 600sqm, holds a couple of trees and some sad-looking moruya shrubs.

But after over a decade of living in a tiny apartment, as we opened the front door it felt like a dream come true.

In weeks to come, we'd christen the tiny house Tea Tree Cottage. And as we opened that door, the Tea Tree Cottage Adventure began.

Vivid

Wheels up

Timberrr!

Jacaranda with a trace of dog

Storm clouds

Grevillea

Melbourne

I was in Melbourne recently - work, the usual thing - days packed from dawn 'til dusk with meetings, and preparation for meetings, and actions following meetings. Late one night I tossed exhaustion and responsibility to one side to claim a sweet dark half hour for myself, and went wandering down Bourke Street mall to look at the Christmas decorations. They were perfectly pleasant, but it was on the walk back to the hotel that I happened across one of those scenes that are only ever found by chance - a man busking, making music from junk.

True junk - his instruments comprised an old oil tin, a saucepan lid screwed to a stand, a used plastic container of some description, a variety of empty and de-labelled tins (somehow that detail seemed important). He was drumming away upon them as if his very life depended upon it, generating a cheerful cacophony.

Nearby stood a small knot of young-ish people, probably drunk-ish, dancing like happy puppets to the noise. Whenever a passer-by paused to drop a coin into the busker's cap, the puppets would cheer and enthusiastically high-five the donor. Whether this was an incentive to donate or not was hard to tell.

A little further back, perched on the stone curlicue of one of the gates of Chinatown, was a couple. Stoned without a doubt, and in the process of becoming stonier still, they sat contentedly on one another, gazing blankly into space, air-drumming to the beat.

This is not a story, of course - just an observational piece recording one of those scenes which made my heart swell with love for the beautiful oddness of humanity, and the cities which draws them together in concentrated doses. Amid many more dark hours of work and responsibility, the memory of that bright street and that mad noise held its glow.

This is why I strike

If you are appalled that school children are missing school to attend the climate strike today, you are not alone. I am appalled. But I am appalled because those who birthed those children, who are raising them, who collectively share reponsibility for keeping them safe - are so blind to the most significant issue of our time – likely of all time – that they they didn’t strike first, and indeed for the most part are not striking at all. Instead, they are leaving leadership on this issue to their children, who take action so they do not have to fear for their future.

So that they don’t have to  fear for a future in which which water shortages become more frequent and severe. In which refugees become greater in number. In which mental health deteriorates. In which refugees grow in number as they flee areas where water has become so scarce that they are no longer able to inhabit them. In which conflict increases, as habitable land diminishes and displaced people struggle to find somewhere to call home. In which huge swathes of the weird and wonderful creatures we share this bit of space rock with have gone extinct, never to be seen again – and in some cases, never to be seen at all.[i]

If you think this sounds dramatic, it is already happening. The US Department of Defence is already planning for a future in which conflict as a result of climate change increases significantly.[ii]

The President of Kiribati, after years of advocating for change to protect his small island nation, has bought 100 acres of land in Fiji, so that when the now apparently inevitable time comes that his people have to abandon their home as a result of the sea level rise which is already impacting them, they have somewhere to go. He worries about the impact this will have on his people, whose identity is intertwined with their land – and how they will negotiate a Kiribati identity in a foreign land.[iii]

Traditional owners of lands in Samoa and Tonga, whose cultures, stories, traditions have grown up around the patterns of the world around them – are finding that these stories, rooted deep in time, are out of kilter with changing weather patterns, and the resulting changes to behaviour of plants and animals. Doesn’t sound like much, until you learn that these changing patterns of behaviour are already impacting production of fruits and other plants which we all eat – including the creatures we eat – rely on pollination by insects, birds and seasonal winds.

For the most part, in urban Australia, we are fairly well insulated from impacts such as these, so they, and the climate changes which are producing them, are easy to dismiss. But the lived experience of those in rural areas shows that our wide brown land is already being hit hard. Many parts of NSW are experiencing the most severe drought on record. The results of this have already been catastrophic for many. Mass fish deaths, the shooting of thousands of head of sheep by landowners with no other choice, people leaving farms which have been in their families for generations, loss of precious topsoil no longer held in place by grass lond dead due to the drought is swept away by windstorms, suicide by those who cannot bear these changes and their impacts any more.

While for those of us in urban Australia the greatest impact most of us have personally experienced is a slight increase to our milk prices, beyond the urban fringe the impacts are such that within 50 years Dubbo will be a town set in the midst of desert.

To those who say that the response we should be making to this situation is to recycle, catch public transport, and so on - I, and many, many others like me, have been doing this for years. I recycle - but Australia's recycling crisis makes it doubtful that thoserecycalabes will in fact be recycled. I try to take public transport -but Sydney's woeful public tranport system makes this often impractical and sometimes unsafe. I water my garden with grey water from my kitchen and shower. I buy the ethical choices when I’m shopping. I, and the many, many others like me, have done these things, and all the other things one is "supposed" to do - the little things which collectively are supposed to produce the necessary change. They are not enough.

Unlike many, I have had the privilege of leading an environmental education organisation; I now work with another in which care for our common home is integral to its work; I am fortunate to be able to work with like-minded others in similar organisations in this space.

It is not enough.

We need urgent society-scale change.

The efforts of individuals, NGOs, and even many business enterprises,[iv] are not enough to get the job done. The change we need now needs to happen in, and come from, the top. It needs to come from our government. And this change can only be accomplished with votes and/or the weight of public opinion.

Our last federal election showed how little confidence we should have in the electoral process to produce the necessary change. We have a Prime Minister who, before assuming his current role, attracted global notoriety for bringing a lump of coal into parliament and joking about how there was no need to be scared of it. It came as no surprise that his government continued to support the advancement of the Adani mine, with its promise of being one of the biggest fossil fuel extractors in the world when up and running. With some time until the next election, votes, for the purposes of now, are out.

This leaves the weight of public opinion. Well-planned civil disobedience typically follows a hierarchy, in which each new level of disobedience is embarked upon when action at the previous level has failed to achieve the sought-for result.

People who have been alert to the situation we are in have been signing petitions and lobbying politicians and educating children for years – decades now. All these years of lobbying have made no difference, except that the situation has continued to worsen. And so today we step up a level on the hierarchy of civil disobedience. To one which speaks of disruption – to one which speaks to those who talk only money in economic cost, the only language they seem to understand. Those in power should be paying attention. The people they govern are becoming increasingly desperate in the face of their governments’ failure to act.

If you're saying that the children who are skipping school today would better serve this crisis by finishing their educations and growing up to make a difference – we don’t have time. Without dramatic society-wide change, in 12 years the climate will have changed, and with that all the consequences we know about, and likely others we haven’t thought of, will come to pass. The lives millions of fellow creatures whose lives are being, and will be lost, through these changes at increasing rates, taking with them their unique genetic codes, the results of millons of years of evolution, as a result of our action and inaction. No matter how sophistcated our cloning etc gets, the damage will already have been done. We will not be able to recreate the Eden into which we and our children were born.

The only answer is action. And the time for that action is now. The people who should be taking it are the adults – the mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, the teachers of today. But in the face of their inaction, the children are stepping in. And in my first act of civil disobedience, so am I.

The Dunfanaghy Workhouse

Dunfanaghy is a small town on the north-west coast of Ireland. To me it seemed to combine all the best elements of the world so far – mountains like Switzerland, moors like Yorkshire, and a quiet coastal fishing village which reminded me of Gerroa, a town on the coast south of Sydney, where I spent summer holidays with my family when I was small.

The Dunfanaghy Workhouse was the reason for my visit here. Built in 1842, a couple of the original buildings still remain and have been converted into an exhibition which tells the story of the workhouse’s construction and original use.

Workhouses have been built across Britain and Ireland from the 1600s, places where those unable to support themselves found work, food and a roof over their heads. They must have been desperately miserable places, as they were deliberately designed to give the poor what they needed and not an iota more – and that goes for their morale just as much as their material needs. Indeed, there appeared to be an emphasis on ensuring workhouses were dreary places, so that only the most desperate would seek refuge there, and leave as soon as they were able.

At Dunfanaghy, the workhouse consisted of separate buildings and yards for men, women, boys and girls (families were split up in the workhouse, but parents were able to see their children; however they weren’t able to leave except as a unit, making it impossible for, say, the man of the house to leave his family in comparative safety while he sought work). There was also a fever hospital, infirmary and a main building housing dormitories, day rooms, a workshop and school room.

Model of Dunfanaghy Workhouse in its heyday

Children were expected to spend 3 hours a day in the workhouse school, while adults spent most of their time working – the women undertaking all the domestic chores of the workhouse and making clothes and bedding, while the men typically had a choice between breaking stones for road construction or oakum picking (separating the fibres of old ropes for use as caulking on ships).

In 1845, the daily rations for adults and children over 13 comprised:

• 170g oatmeal and 378ml buttermilk for breakfast
• 1.3kg potatoes and 378ml buttermilk for dinner
• 140g oatmeal and 378 ml buttermilk for supper

Hardly kingly fare, but I imagine it would have seemed like manna from heaven if your only alternative was literally starving in the streets, which in 1845, at the start of the Great Famine, was the case for many. The 5 paupers resident at the start of that year grew to 600 over the next two years, with the workhouse having to be extended to accommodate those desperate enough to seek refuge within its walls as the famine tightened its grip.

Back to Ireland: the Rock of Doon

Well my friends, we took a little hiatus while I returned home, to work, to my normal life. However a rainy long weekend beckons, and it seemed a good time to return to Ireland …

When last we met we were in Sligo, at the grave of W B Yeats, found by the first of two happy accidents in a single day. The second such happy accident occurred along similar lines, with a well-placed road and a just-glimpsed road sign along the way. This time it was the Rock of Doon that I found myself a couple of kilometres from, and gladly diverting for.

The Rock was, in ancient times, the coronation-place of the O’Neills, chieftains of Donegal and Ulster, and I’d long wanted to visit it. A short climb up a paved footpath brought me to the top of the Rock, where a glowery day looked down on me, and the sounds of farms and forestry made this place of Celtic history, with all the ghosts of the legends I’d read about it, seem rather ordinary really.

At the foot of the rock is a holy well. This one was said to cure afflictions of the feet, and beside it a couple of nearly leafless small bushes were weighed down by the tokens brought as offerings by the hopeful. Rosary beads, crucifixes in metal and wood, socks upon socks upon socks, and an empty cardboard medicine box.

Offerings at Doon Well

The well itself was housed neatly in a little stone house with well-made wooden doors, and the stations (the prayers which it was believed had to be said to bring on a miracle) inscribed in the stone of the roof. Two plastic measuring jugs sat tidily to one side, filled with water from the well. I glanced up – a couple of houses sat not far off. I liked to think that someone who lived in one of them perhaps made it their job to keep the well ready for visitors.

Doon Well - doors closed ...

... and open.

On the edge of possibilities

There’s something rather bewitching about teetering on the precipice of a delicious possibility – so close to it that you can nearly – nearly – touch it, in all its dreamy perfection, but not so close that you can see the disillusionment which is certain to become apparent the moment you give way to that gravity-like force of all delightful possibilities (pulling you to themselves with their inviting fingers) …

The Connemara Mountains, laundry and grave-tending

I slept in the Connemara Mountains that night, in a Gaeltacht (an area of Ireland where Gaelic is routinely spoken and actively promoted – if you’re ever in the mood for a brainteaser, I recommend that you try figuring out what recycling goes into which bin when they’re all labelled with Gaelic and nothing else).

The next morning, after washing my socks in an icy lake (I pinned them under rocks in a little inlet and let the waves do most of the work), I continued on to Donegal, and having two happy accidents on the way. The first was seeing the grave of W B Yeats, which I’d hoped to visit but thought I’d run out of time, so was quite delighted to find myself reading a sign pointing me to a beautiful old church by the road in County Sligo. The cemetery wasn’t his original burial-place (Yeats died in France during World War II), but it was an ideal place for a man with a deep love of Sligo to end up – in sight of mountains and fields, surrounded by trees and birds, and with sunlight slanting through the trees. As I left, I noticed an old man carefully removing a twig from a grave which was already meticulous. It bore a woman’s name, and a date of decease from 2009 – his wife, I imagined, as he gently walked up and down across the gravel which covered it, making sure everything was in perfect order.

Laundry day.

Aran Islands: goats' cheese

The long walk back to the ferry at Kilronan was fortunately broken when I came across the farm which had produced the fresh goat’s cheese I’d enjoyed at breakfast, and I was delighted to find they had a beautifully set up visitor’s centre – complete with educational displays and large windows through which you could watch the cheese being made. It was fascinating to learn that the young family which started the farm came up with the idea when the husband got tired of spending 10 months of each year away from his wife and small children on fishing trawlers. After some research, they decided to build their goat farm, and from all accounts it’s a great success, with the goats thriving on the wonderful mix of herbs, grasses and other plants which grow naturally on the island. Keen to buy some cheese for my supper, I particularly wanted to try one they made with dillisk, a seaweed grown and collected on the island. They didn’t have any in stock, so the farmer whipped round the back and made some for me – can’t get fresher than that!

Fresh dillisk goats' cheese.

A couple of hours later, back on the mainland and heading for Donegal, I stopped in the midst of the breathtaking Connemarra mountains and ate my dillisk goats cheese on fresh, crispy bread. Sitting there, in the clear wild air, I felt a wordless grace forming – images of thanksgiving for the land, and the goats, the grain, the sea, the dillisk, and the hands which together brought these things together to nourish me on my journey.