Yesterday I was
moved by a bucketful of sunflowers. They were leaning on each other; their
bespeckled faces pointed cheerfully in various directions. Tall. Joyful. Those
thick-stemmed blooms sparked a golden chain of connected thoughts that led me
to sadness. They led me to lovely lost-to-us Liam.
For years, Liam
Davison and I were colleagues. A smiling, gentle man with an expansive manner,
he had faith in me and in my skills. I admired his immense talent with words.
And people.
So, I decided to
share an extract of his work with you. And I hope it inspires you to seek out
what he wrote for us all to keep.
In one of his
haunting short novels, Liam captures time and landscape and
character in his imagining of the story of the mysterious White Woman, who,
legend says, was held captive by
the Kurnai People of nearby Gippsland in the 1840s, the time of early settlers.
The narrator
took part in an expedition to find the woman. Forty years later, he tells his
tale to the un-named son of a fellow traveller, who has come in search of the
truth about his father’s role in the event.
It’s odd how memory serves you. Or how it fails. Before you
arrived here tonight, knocking surreptitiously at my door for answers to your
half-formed questions, I could barely recall your father’s face. Oh
yes, I could conjure up the vague outline of a man if I put my mind to it
(large, heavy-jowled, a solid jaw) but of course there was never any
need. He belonged to his own past, you see, as much as mine.
Nowadays, no doubt, you’d make a photographic print to hold it fast, the image
of him as he was then, as if you had to fight against the past to keep him
from slipping into where he belongs. Yes, I’m right aren’t I? Memory’s
not enough. Tell me you haven’t sat in front of the magic box
yourself and winced at the phosphorescent flash.
Yet now, with you sitting here before me, the outline sharpens; it takes
on your features, your voice, your manner of holding the hot tea to your lips.
Your father is back before me. All the years before have gone and I find, yes,
I do remember. I remember what he was like. I talk with
confidence about the things we did. The events fall easily into place,
day follows day, night follows harrowing night. I open my mouth and
it all comes tumbling out as if it happened yesterday: the search for her,
the first signs of your father’s presence, the journey up the river… Almost
without thinking, it finds its undeniable shape.
But I worry. If it was somebody else who
knocked, somebody else who walked impertinently into my shabby little room to
claim association with my past, would I have just as readily recalled a
different face? Would things have moulded themselves just as
comfortably to accommodate a different set of features, different questions, different
expectations? Would I have found myself recounting a different story
about a different past? And if no one had knocked…?
The White
Woman, p. 73
How did smiling sunflowers lead me to sorrow?
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| Photo from abc.net.au |
Liam and his beloved life-partner Frankie were on MH-17.
Only his words remain.
