Year of the cyclone.

In that year of the cyclone that destroyed a city, I had finished school, underperforming; not that anyone had been pushing me.

One subject saved me in that final year of floods and impeachments and cyclones; and that was down to D. H. Lawrence. The Virgin and the Gypsy and Sons and Lovers were both for some reason on the English study list. In the former the daughter of a straight-laced rector has an affair with a gipsy while her repulsive grandmother drowns in a flood; the latter concerned a boy’s relationship with his mother and girlfriend in a dreary English mining village. Lawrence wrenched and wrung masterpieces from the bleak shaft-riven hills of northern England, and proved that genius or at least great artistry can emerge from the strictures of anti-intellectual provincialism. I wrote something along those lines for the exam, and after a post-examinations interlude at a relative’s house in a small town called Birregurra overlooking the Warrnambool train line, I returned home to find that whoever judged these things had approved what I had written.

Christmas came. In my mind I hold one of those memory things whereby two images fuse; one  superimposed over the other, like a faulty photograph. My double-exposure has three young siblings jubilating over Christmas toys in an oddly-furnished lounge room, this image grotesquely overlaid with the incoherent rubble of a smashed city: Darwin.

Over that Harry Chapin and Bachman-Turner Overdrive summer, I took an interview at the city campus of RMIT, and gained a place in a course in film. I can’t remember what I said. I had barely seen a film in my life.