Kindred Spirits

One day the wind changes

And a new nanny blows in from the north

A young lady who is on her own journey

But your four-year-old self has no concept of any of that

She is a magical lovely being

With bright curly hair

And a big smile

She makes everything fun

Your very own Mary Poppins

She is even English! 

And she becomes a part of your life. Your family. Your world. 

Eventually, the wind changes

As it must and always will

And your very own Mary Poppins

Heads off again for more adventures of her own

Over the years you all keep in touch

Until it grows sporadic 

Life just happens 

You go to school

Parents separate 

You go to high school and university

And travel 

And write 

And everybody goes about their days filled with breakfasts, and lunches, and dinners

And the small things we don’t think about

That mark and pass each day

Until over twenty years have passed 

And you’re a year off from thirty 

And out of the blue

Your very own Mary Poppins writes to you through your website 

And you discover she lives in Chicago! 

You plan to meet up.

You’re nervous. Why?! 

It has been close to twenty-five years since you’ve seen each other! 

And you see her, and she’s still your nanny

She’s still magical and lovely 

Still has the great big smile, though all her curls are gone

And she has children of her own

(The same age you were once upon a time!) 

And even though all this time has passed

Even though all these lives have been lived in the intervening time

It’s just like being with family, with a very close aunt or big sister 

She asks if you could stay in Chicago and become her nanny! 

You wish you could. You really do. 

You never want to leave! 

But the wind has changed

And you’re headed off for adventures of your own

You give her a hug

And promise to return

That night, your heart is so full

You can’t even sleep. 

It’s not memories, or even topics of conversation,

It’s this sense

That you’ve rediscovered who you are

Where you came from

And who was there

Who made you who you are

And that time and space

Can never separate kindred spirits

People who are supposed to be in our lives

And make it better

The end. 

The Road from Coorain

One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.

Jill Ker Conway

A book on the shelf

The name, Jill Ker Conway,

Stirs a memory

A historian and writer

Born in Australia

Now living in America 

The Road from Coorain

An autobiography

A story of growing up in rural NSW

Barely surviving the drought 

Living in Sydney 

Post the second world war

The familiar names of 

Mosman, Waitara, and Pennant Hills 

The relief of reading stories

Of someone 

Who never felt at home in Australia

In Sydney 

Despite the beaches and bush 

The smell of eucalyptus and earth 

What it feels to board the plane

To leave 

Knowing that Australia will always

Be a part of who you are

But knowing that your life

Exists somewhere over the ocean

Relief and tears 

Connection with a woman 

Whom, despite an age gap

Of half a century,

Loves history and reading and learning

And discovery 

And finds a place

Beyond the continent 

Of her birth. 

The end. 

Mary Poppins She Wrote

Mary Poppins came into my life

Because she floated daily

Into our loungeroom

The VHS watched and rewound and re-watched

So endlessly 

That the tape eventually died 

There has always been Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane

The toys have always flown into their cupboards with a click

Julie Andrews has always been Mary Poppins 

Years later 

On an excursion for Writing History

A pre-honours class in research and writing

The librarian at the State Library has pulled out a stack of papers 

Random examples of the items held there

The letters of P.L. Travers 

Did you know that the author of the Mary Poppins books,

Upon which the movie was based,

Was an Australian? 

That there were disagreements between the original author and Disney

(Corporation betraying the Writer) 

Graduation, a world trip, heart break, meditation, later

I was running in a park

And found a statue of Mary Poppins

(Unveiled by my aunt!) 

To commemorate that P.L. Travers had lived in Sydney

Just a few blocks from my house 

Another time

Listening to Mornings with Margaret

A fascinating interview with Valerie Lawson

About the biography she has written 

The thought, “I must read that”

Filed away and forgotten 

Later, in London 

Wandering through the library 

And Valerie Lawson’s Mary Poppins She Wrote 

Sitting there on the shelf

And from the woods of Virginia I read

P.L. Travers

Never identified as Australian

Had left and, but for one short visit, never returned

Felt New York was her spiritual home 

Hated the movie 

Never found love

Never found peace

Was eternally searching 

Knowing the postscript is delicious 

And heart-breaking

And joyous 

Where do I fit? 

I’m no P.L. Travers

I haven’t even been published yet

And yet something stirs

Identifies 

And today,

The sky is blue.

The end. 

July 4th

My friend Helene and I singing the Swedish frog song.
Photo by Rene Macioce. 

The camp where I work was founded by pacifists, people who had endured the horrors of Nazi Germany. Today our place of work is staffed by people from all over the world Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Poland, Czech Republic, Sweden... As a result, we don't celebrate Independence Day, we celebrate Diversity Day. In the evening the international staff and international campers share their cultures, their music and stories and tidbits of information that make their cultures different to the American one. But even Diversity Day makes me uncomfortable. I feel anxious around displays of nationalism. And so, I wrote and shared the following. 

Diversity Day. I don’t care where you come from. 

Allow me to explain. I am Australian. I am Spanish. I am descendent from Filipinos, Dutch, and Polish. I have blood relatives in Spain, Switzerland, England, America, Canada, the Philippines, and Australia. I speak un pocito Español. I grew up in Sydney, approximately 10,000 miles from this place. Where I come from we wear thongs instead of flip flops, the forest is called the bush. We eat lollies and not candy, and wear singlets instead of tank tops. We say it is hot outside, and not it is hot out. I call my friends on a mobile not a cell, We don’t walk upside down. Nor do our toilet bowls flush in the opposite direction... I don’t think. I never rode a kangaroo to school. I never owned a pet koala. I never met Steve Irwin. 

I’m rather uncomfortable with declarations of nationalistic pride. I grew up in a country whose national day of pride is Anzac Day, which commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealander troops on the shores of Galipoli, Turkey, and were subsequently slaughtered in their thousands. Now we’re friends with the Turkish, and we eat their delicious foods and every year thousands more Australians congregate at Galipoli to remember the fallen from nearly a hundred years before. 

I’m a raging pacifist. I don’t get war. I really don’t. Once upon a time the British fought the Americans. Then they decided to stop. Now they are allies. Now they laugh at each other from across the pond. Seventy years ago my country was shooting Turks, and Germans, and Italians. Seventy years later I grew up eating pita bread, pretzels, and pizza. When my grandparents were teenagers they were sheltering from Japanese bombs and fearing death. My grandmother now drives a Japanese car, we all eat sushi, and my class at school almost had more Japanese students than Australian. 

I don’t get displays of nationalistic pride. They make me uncomfortable. I’ve spent the last five years traveling the world. I’ve been to Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Wales, and the US of A. Now I may have only begun to scrape the surface of the metaphorical travel iceberg but here’s what I’ve discovered in my travels. No one place is better or worse than any other. America is no more the land of the free than Australia is the land of sunshine. In all those places I’ve seen people going about their daily lives. They wake up, they eat food, they go to the toilet, they spend the day making ends meet, if they’re lucky they’ll have time to play. At the end of the day they gather with their families and then they go to sleep. There are variations on this theme. Yes, many people have less other people. Yes, you have the occasional people that spend their days plotting the demise of other people who aren’t their people. But you know what? Most people just happened upon this here crazy planet, and they’re doing the best that they can.

Diversity Day. I don’t care where you come from. I care that you treat me decently just because. I care that I can be open to cultures and traditions and foods and that aren’t my own. It may be naive. It may be simplistic. But we’ve got to start somewhere. I hope you’ll care less where I come from. At the end of the day, let’s just exist on this planet together. Let’s draw on several thousand years of human history and share the foods that our ancestors ate. Let’s find a way to share life, liberty, and the pursuit of happyness in all its rich diversity. 

The end. 

Someone Like Him

from Australian Business Review

They announced Geoffrey Rush as 

Australian of the Year

He is the person 

Who this year, most 

Epitomises what it means 

To be Australian

And it makes me feel good

Makes me feel proud

As an artist

As an Australian

To know that someone like him, is 

The Representation 

Of my national identity

The other Australians of note this year

Are also worthy of recognition.

Laurie Baymarrwangga,

An Aboriginal elder who has worked to 

Teach and share and maintain her culture

In spite of invasion

In spite of ignorance

And Marita Cheng

Who inspires other young women 

To go out into a world 

Dominated by men

And question, and investigate, and analyze 

And to become excited and passionate

About learning

And Lynne Sawyers

Who cared for hundreds of children

Not even her own

Took them in and said

This is your home too

We are artists and scientists and carers of the land

We are inventors and innovators 

We are from all over the world

We live, work, and travel internationally

We live, work, and play in our own backyard

This strange large island

At the bottom of the earth

We are more than kangaroos and wattle

We are more than yobbos on the beach drinking beer

We are more than the Anzac legend suggests

More than boyish mates coming together under fire

We are more than a flag coloured by British rule 

We are a complicated lot

Represented this year, by an actor

Who gets on with his work

And supports others to do the same 

Who shows it is possible to be

A brilliant artist of the world

And still be, Australian in name.

I Could Write A Book

And it's nearly 1am
And you're wired
Because you've spent the last seven hours reading about musicals in Australia
And you're a bit frustrated because you can't access all the journals you need to
And the more you read the more you want to know
And every now and then you have "ah ha!" moments
And you feel like you get it and it all makes sense
And then you re-read your notes and realize you need more material to back up what you're thinking
But you have a mighty list to go and tackle the British Library with tomorrow
And that makes you so excited
Because you love learning and reading and theorizing and trying to make sense of it all
And you're really grateful you did that podcast thing last year
Because you have all these quotes and useful bits and pieces up your sleeve
And your sensible self tells you to GO TO BED ALREADY!
But your inner writer needs to VENT!
And your soul needs to calm down because it's so excited
So you promise that NOW you will go brush your teeth, and meditate, and journal, and sleep
To start all over again tomorrow
The end.

Leaving Oz

Imagine a girl who wakes up one day to find herself on a plane. And she is somewhere over the Pacific. And she thinks perhaps the events of the past year and a half have only been a dream. Because suddenly it all seems right to be flying in the air towards a new life, heading towards a life of musicals and theatre and being away from the place where she was born and grew. 

And even though this is her third trip away, this trip feels different from the trips before, because now she has the Scarecrow and the Tinman and the Lion by her side. In the past year and a half she has acquired a little more wisdom. She did the meditation course and sometimes it was hard but mostly it was wonderful and she learnt to sit quietly with herself and be still. 

And even though her heart had been shattered into a million thousand pieces, she realised that she had all these wonderful friends around her (And you were there! And you were there!) and she learnt to look after herself and take care of herself which were all very important. And it was heartening to make all these discoveries. 

And in discovering she had a little more wisdom and a little more heart than before, she discovered she had the courage to go out into the world as herself and not be afraid of what other people thought or said or how often they projected their own fears about the creative life onto her being. 

And she made a promise to herself that she would continue to practise as often as possible to have wisdom and heart and courage and remember her friends by her side and to go out into the world and trip the light fantastic.

The end. Sort of. 

Moving to London

Left: Abuelo and Abuela in Manilla in the 1950s, Right: Mum and an assortment of (now) uncles and aunts in 1963

Forty-eight years ago you sailed into Sydney and leaned against the railing of the ship 

Thinking of children who weren’t even born yet

All the children with you would one day be grown-ups and married with children of their own

Could you have imagined me, your granddaughter, named after you

Who when she went to Spain for the first time felt strangely at home

Despite the language barrier 

Who longed her whole life to be European, to speak Spanish, who thrilled and delighted at finally getting a Spanish passport 

How would you feel knowing your nieta is not an out and proud Australian

That I cringe at our accents and our inability to speak more than one language 

That I find Australian culture frustrating

That I can’t stand that our national day of pride is a day commemorating a bloody battle thousands of miles away 

That I cannot connect with Australian history because it is so contested 

A few months ago I sailed into Sydney myself

I got up at 5am to watch the lights of Sydney Harbour come into view

And I thought of you leaning against the railing of the Iberia

Could you have imagined as you sailed past Nielsen Park or Point Piper or Taronga Zoo that these would be the sites of my childhood?

Strange to think that the Opera House wasn’t even finished yet 

Could you have imagined me singing in the Opera House?! Or having my year 10 formal at the Zoo overlooking the giraffes looking out to the Harbour? 

Could you have imagined that I would grow up among the eucalyptus and the smell of the Australian bush

And yet never feel at home in it

To feel frustrated every time someone asks “but don’t you feel so lucky?”

In two months, I’m leaving this place

To go to the land where your brothers live

And then to London to seek my own life and put down my own roots

Where I will be in forty-eight years time? 

And what stories will have played out between my arrival at Heathrow and sitting down to reflect on it all?

Abuelo, forty-eight years ago you sailed to Sydney

To a land that for you was entirely sight unseen 

No internet to do your research

No crystal ball to let you know that it was all going to be ok, that you were making the right decision

Our wanderings are not over yet

We are still shifting in time and space 

But wherever we go, there we are

And we have our stories and our ancestors to guide the way

The Life I Lead

to dance around the living room

to watch cyd with her legs up to eternity flirt with gene

who danced in the rain laced with milk

so it would be more visible on camera

to watch yul and deborah

one-two-three-and across the royal palace of what is now Thailand 

but used to be called Siam

etcetera etcetera etcetera!

to have tea with jam and bread on the mountains of austria

maria and mary are your nannies

julie is magical because she sings and dances and appears in two different movies with different coloured hair and rescues the children of europe and england from their sad fathers

just a spoonful of sugar and imagination and pop into the pavement to win races

singing makes everybody happy 

even retired grumpy sea captains

yes sir!

to want to be a part of that world

to be a strong princess

to be like barbara and fiercely independent and capable

just leave everything to meeee

hello dolly, hello dolly, it’s so nice 

to one day find yourself transported

from the land of oz to the rooftops of london 

and all you have to do is click your shiny red shoes together

and wish and pray your life could be enchanted

the end. 

19 Lovelies

Just because it is the nineteenth day of the year, and the nineteenth day of the month, here are nineteen things inspiring me at present...

1. My job. I love getting paid to watch a profesh musical every day. It is amazing.
2. Being in a new Australian musical, Wonderland. Working with beautiful, lovely, talented, and awesome people.
3. Seth Rudetsky. Whenever I am down, sad, or lonely, Seth is there with a deconstruction to remind me that someone is as obsessive about musicals as I am. Perhaps even more so.
4. MusicalTalk. Every episode I learn something new. It inspires me to learn more, to get my hands on every musical ever recorded, and to watch everything that comes out.
5. The absolute plethora of musical activity happening in Australia right now. Carnegie 18, Jersey Boys, Wicked, Hairspray, Mary Poppins, Xanadu, Rock of Ages, Doctor Zhivago, Legally Blonde... We are not a cultural wasteland of despair.
6. My beautiful friends. You know who you are. You are amazing.
7. Playing flute and learning new music.
8. Watching people rally together to help each other in the flood crisis.
9. Singing in front of an audience. Singing at home. Singing in rehearsal. Singing lessons.
10. Writing every morning for half an hour.
11. Knowing that I'm moving to London to study musical theatre.
12. Knowing that I'm going back to summer camp in June.
13. Going back to the markets and seeing all my lovely vendors again. Eating beautiful food.
14. Nemo, my regular "The Big Issue" vendor, who always has a smile and a story about the current issue
15. Running weekly morning meditation sessions in Glebe and sharing what I've learnt and knowing that  others are benefiting too
16. Amy Krouse Rosenthal and her 7 things. Always Trust Magic, Beckon the Lovely, Connected, Do, Empty Spaces, Figure it out as you go, Go to it.
17. Researching, writing, and recording episodes for Flusical with Flick.
18. Going to dance class and being surrounded by beautiful, talented people, and being pushed to be better
19. Breathing into the moment and trusting that it will be ok.

Podcasting

Last year I started listening to a FABULOUS podcast called MusicalTalk. Every week a group of Brits get together and talk about musicals. Their focus is mainly on London and the UK theatre scene, with occasional dips across the pond to talk about what’s happening on Broadway. They talk with actors, directors, writers, stage managers, audience members, all the plethora of folks involved in making musicals, and have a whole list of very well known industry folk on their interview credits including Stephen Schwartz, Alan Menken, Anthony Rapp, Johnny Depp, and Stephanie J Block to name but just a few.

So a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to MusicalTalk and I thought, I like talking about musicals! Why don’t I do my own podcast? And talk about Australian musicals? And in a rush of excitement I told the girls at dance about it. And they got very excited. And then, last Thursday after Chris had whipped us into shape in Broadway Jazz, Flick and I sat down and attempted our very own podcast. The results are here for your listening pleasure. In this inaugural episode we talk about our first experiences of musical theatre. It was ridiculously fun to sit and talk musicals. It was ridiculously fun to sit and edit the thing (thank you Apple and your wonderful GarageBand invention!). In short I had a total blast. Do what you love. And you will be happy. The end. 

PS. We need a name for the podcast. Suggestions welcome!

Rookwood

When one thinks of moments of beauty, inspiration, and excitement, a cemetery is probably not on the list of things that spring to mind. Let us travel back to the Victorian era... First of all, death was considered in an entirely different way to the way we view it today. It was much more out in the open, publicly discussed, shared, and mourned. Concurrently in this period, we see the development of public green spaces - large beautifully designed parks and public spaces for people to enjoy fresh air, sunshine, and be close to nature. Central Park, Hyde Park (both in London and Sydney), and the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, are beautiful examples of such parks. 

These two notions came together in the form of the necropolis, or “city of the dead” (from the Latin words “necro” for dead body and “polis” for city), a large open space that was at once a park and a cemetery, or as it was referred to by our Victorian counterparts, a garden cemetery. A space for people to come and bury their dead, mourn the loss of their loved ones, and be in a beautiful environment. In Sydney, we are home to one of the the largest necropolis’ in the world, and what is considered to be one of the best examples of a Victorian necropolis in the world, Rookwood Necropolis (a tiny portion of which is pictured above, picture is from the Rookwood website). Located between Lidcome and Strathfield in Sydney’s west, Rookwood comprises 700 acres of burial grounds, featuring beautiful gardens, architecture, and the names of over 800,000 people who are interred within the grounds. 

Arriving at Rookwood on the free shuttle from Lidcombe Station for the Open Day yesterday was entirely bizzare. There were bands playing music, sausage sizzles and Devonshire tea stalls, face painting for the kids, and people everywhere. People of all ages and backgrounds were wandering around the grounds, looking at headstones, listening to volunteer tour guides share the histories of the cemetery and some of its more infamous inhabitants, and looking for graves of relatives and ancestors. If there is one thing that unites humanity, it’s death. No matter where we are born, under what circumstances we live, what we do, at some point or other, we will all no longer be living. 

Due to the sheer size of the place, I unfortunately missed the talks I was hoping to attend - behind the scenes at the crematorium, and the history of embalming, but it was rather incredible to just wander through the grounds for an hour and a half. I felt that the original designers of Rookwood would have been proudly watching over the creation yesterday. Their ideal of the garden cemetery was not realised in the nineteenth century owing to poor burial practices, issues with sewerage, and poor management, but today Rookwood is an eerily beautiful place. It is steeped in history, and captures the ethos of a time gone by. 

Is it morbid to enjoy learning about the history of death? Or is it just a natural part of living? I find it fascinating, and I think we could do well to take a note from our Victorian forebears and bring the discussion of death back into a more public domain. Tours are run by the Friends of Rookwood (a volunteer organisation that works to promote the “social, historical, and cultural values” and preservation of the site), on the first Sunday of the month. It would be great to go back and experience it again. 

Beyond Zero Emissions

I used to be incredibly frustrated by what I didn’t know. I remember being in kindergarten and being annoyed at the way grown-ups kept using words I did not know the meaning of. As a six year-old trying to fit into and navigate the world around me, I was convinced that somewhere in the city were old men in suits whose job it was to invent new words and disseminate them amongst the adult population on a daily basis in order that there would always be words I would never know. 

As a grown-up, there are still many things I do not know. A big topic at the moment is global warming and climate change. As an average person with no scientific training and a slight aversion to numbers, I don’t “get” the science behind the debate. But as an average person, I can comprehend this. The stuff we use to fuel our society, namely fossil fuels, is finite. Humans live in a way that is detrimental to our health and the planet’s.

Last week I attended a talk at Town Hall on a new report called Beyond Zero Emissions: Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan. Thirty scientists, engineers, and academics got together and asked how can Australia move toward a more sustainable renewable energy existence. And they came up with a 200-page document thats shows how Australia can move to 100% renewable energy by 2020. And you know what got me excited? The men in suits say its possible. It’s not just bearded patchouli hippies. It’s Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Carr and former Australian Chief Scientist Robin Batterham and British engineer Allan Jones. 

We have to believe that change is entirely possible. It’s happening in Spain and Germany and the United States. Commercial scale renewable energy. It was something I didn’t really understand when I was walking the Camino across northern Spain a couple of years ago. I saw wind turbines and solar panels on a scale I had never encountered and I started asking myself questions about energy and how it all works. 

I still do not entirely understand the world. But tell my six year-old self that she would one day go to university and spend four years learning words she never knew and even after majoring in English there would still be an untold world of words beyond her cognition, and that’s not frustrating but entirely exciting. And tell the girl who read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and walked across Spain and saw wind turbines and solar panels that in just over 6 months she would be working for a sustainability shop and going to the Farmer’s Markets every week and eating beautiful organic food and learning that there is so much possibility. 

The world may be on the brink of collapse, but I choose not to be frustrated by what the men in suits beyond my understanding make up and implement across the globe. I choose to believe it is possible for men, and women, to put their brains together and come up with ways to make the world a better place to live in. As Annie Leonard says in the wonderfully eloquent Story of Stuff, with all the clever people on the planet, surely we can come up with a way to live that is not detrimental to our health and very existence. 

I live in a world where anything is possible. I can choose to understand. I can choose to make a difference. As Allan Jones said at the talk on Thursday night, “the barriers to 100% renewable energy are not technological or economic, but regulatory mindset and vested inteterest.” I may have felt powerless and small against the men in suits as six year-old. And I could continue to feel small and powerless against the people in suits today. But I chose to be inspired. I choose to be excited. I choose to believe the world I live in and the way in which I live on it can be beautiful, rich, creative, and sustainable.