Formative Years

My life's experience began in Smithton during wartime, an appropriate time in our history to begin fighting for existence on this earth and the rights to it.

I remember helping my father (who was a builder) to make cement bricks for our front fence...I remember the joy and achievement when finally our first family home was finished...I remember cooking biscuits with mum in our kitchen and feeling proud to be needed....I remember the day my cousin and I cleverly enticed a lizard into an old jam tin and then swiftly closed the lid on it. The horror of my auntie and family when we let it loose on the floor of the dining room, it was a death adder!

I remember fronting a noticeably savage Alsatian, eyeballing him while I carefully moved closer. Slowly I picked up his paw with my right hand and squeezed it tightly, still eye to eye. Because I had heard with my seven year old ears that they would not bite you if you did this, I wanted to test it out. It worked for me.

I remember going to crawl under a barbed wire fence on day, the first of many fences and fields on my journey to school. A large hissing sound burst forth, and a huge Tiger Snake, with several babies either side stood on their tails. The mother eyeballed me with hypnotic intensity. In the next instant I turned and ran for my life...

I remember an immature teacher caning me because he overheard me bragging "He better not cane me", as he had my friends, who did not seem to deserve it. How he ran across the fields and under fences to explain the action to my parents before I reached home. His story was very different to mine.

I remember drawing in my sketch book, imitating the old masters and quickly came to the conclusion that I did not want to imitate...

I remember with my male cousins, rolling pine needles into smokes with dad's confiscated tissue papers, thinking how nasty it was and getting a hiding from dad with his razorstrap for the experience. Thinking then, life's experiences are very rarely your own, they are usually shared with others. So are the questions, so too are the answers...

I remember watching nature with "all its answers" to life. Feeling in nature the "other". How different each person's inner perceptions are. How unique, only completely understood by one. How it shapes our individual reality, which is the real experience of life to each one of us.

Daisy Baites once said: "Surely the World we live in is but the World that lives in us".