AUSTRALIA ~ The Antipodes

AUSTRALIA ~ The Antipodes
I love a sunburnt country / A land of sweeping plains / Of ragged mountain ranges / Of droughts and flooding rains / I love her far horizons / I love her jewel-sea / Her beauty and her terror / The wide brown land for me / ~ Dorothea Mackellar (1885-1968)

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Sunday, December 23, 2007

True story of a first female student at Melbourne University

Melbourne University proudly presents…the first woman to attain a degree in these auspicious realms…But don’t you just love to find another side to a story…AND WHAT A STORY…

At the age of seventy she trundled along…
To capture her own special driver song…
Nervous as buggery…
Prayed for skullduggery…
And quaffed a bottle of brandy to help her along…
Sitting tall and straight
Beside her testing mate…
She appeared cool and confident and controlled…
The licence was hers…
She made not one driving err…
But her walk was more a wobble at the gate…

Rhoda should have been on stage…
A laugh for any age…
She could blemish sacred icons with a smile…
You could not take offence
To this woman of no pretence…
City slicker with a dash of country style…

She could booze and smoke with the best…
And intercourse with the rest…
Be it book or bed
Mind or body stimulation…
Life was meant to be fun
To this woman of the sun…
Not a tangle of protocol complication…

But I could only smile from afar
At this female star…
She loved my older brother far more…
One Christmas I remember he received an expensive watch…
My watch was just lonely by the door…
My brother had the brains and a sense of going somewhere…
I was the rebel wanderer…
Unsung music in my soul…
I so yearned to be
A less shadowy me…
But Rhoda simply found my light poor…

Don’t get me wrong…we could talk…
Rhoda and I…
We could laugh at the world till we cried…
Yet never once did I feel
Any touch of real
Closeness…
Love and pride…
And yet…
Behind laughter and bravado and living for life…
(And the world survived 92 years of Rhoda)…
There may be a well of secret sadness…
And sometimes…
Sadness has a unique way of bringing souls
Together…

Katrina was a troubled little girl…
Adopted by her mother…
In turn adopted by her grandmother…
Her grandmother Rhoda…
Katrina danced through just a fragile five years
Of music…
“Animal Crackers in My Soup”…
Katrina loved to sing and dance…
And we all loved her…

But our time of loving her here on earth…
Was just a tiny whisper…

Rhoda laid a child to rest…
With a simple headstone…
“Katrina”…

35 years passed before I could face “Katrina”…
I could not walk there alone…
So I took Rhoda…in my heart…with me…
Gently I cleared a space for Katrina to dance and sing again…
I wanted to feel Katrina’s joy…
I wanted to share Rhoda’s happiness…

One day…I took Rhoda’s daughter with me…
You see…Rhoda’s daughter had lost “Katrina”…
Never knowing where she sang and danced now…
We talked of making a more detailed identity for “Katrina”…
But her “mother” said no…

Perhaps I was disappointed…
Perhaps…

Don’t get me wrong…we could talk…
Rhoda and I…
We could laugh at the world till we cried…
But just this once did I feel
A special touch of real
Closeness…
Love and pride…

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  • A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken. ~James Dent
  • Autumn is an introspective season when stray thoughts of the mind dive into the mystique of the soul - Gemma Wiseman
  • Autumn is the bridesmaid of Summer and the flowergirl of Winter ~ Gemma Wiseman
  • Autumn whispers the tones of yesterday in a minor key ~ Gemma Wiseman
  • Love is born / With a dark and troubled face, / When hope is dead / And in the most unlikely place; / Love is born, / Love is always born. - Michael Leunig's Christmas Song Cycle "Southern Star"
  • Spring paints the stars of heaven in Earth colours ~ Gemma Wiseman
  • Summer sizzles with a sibilant hush / Broken by dreams of / Clinking ice ~ Gemma Wiseman
  • The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul. - G.K. Chesterton
  • Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. - Stanley Horowitz
  • Winter is the fire, simmering lonely in the soul ~ Gemma Wiseman
  • Winter is the shadow, the etching of the seasons in the mist ~ Gemma Wiseman

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