Tag: family

The Family Recipe

SoutherlyBlog

by Christopher Raja Stay happy and get fat like the laughing Buddha. In India we often associate a full stomach and fat people as being prosperous and happy. Ganesha’s big belly is believed to contain the entire universe within it. Food is something we can all relate to. We all eat. It gives us our sense of identity. Plenty of families still meet over the dinner table, mothers pass on recipes, and Sunday roasts are often the scene of many a family saga. While for other families life can be cruel and they simply can’t afford food. Children go hungry…

… read more

Writing ‘The Burning Elephant’

SoutherlyBlog

by Christopher Raja “startling”, “ vivid” and “compelling” (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November, 2015) The Burning Elephant is a Young Adult novel that deals with the assassination of Indira Gandhi and it is completely set in India; it is also about a family’s journey to Australia. It’s a lot more than this and difficult to categorise. When I began writing this novel it was as a response to my father’s untimely death. He drowned when I was eighteen, and for years I was rudderless and I got very sick. Looking back at our time in India was a way for…

… read more

Text

SoutherlyBlog

by Angela Rockel Salient: [— L. saliens, –ent-, pr. pple. of salire leap] 1. Leaping, jumping … of animals … of water … 3. Salient point: in old medical use, the heart as it first appears in an embryo; hence, the first beginning of life or motion; the starting-point of anything (OED) The waning moon rises later and later, nearer and nearer to dawn, ever thinner, until, lined up between earth and the sun, only its unlit face is turned our way. Then after a pause it reappears, a shining filament on the evening horizon. High pressure systems flatten the…

… read more

Mum

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Mum

by Stephen Sewell My mother was the storyteller in our family. My mother and her sisters. They knew the truth and the secrets, as all women do, of births and deaths and the mystery in between. They knew the histories and could weave them into something that made sense, even when it didn’t. Not necessarily with a moral or a lesson, but conveying the peculiar contingency and strangeness of it all, the coincidences and odd juxtapositions that make us pause and wonder and grieve. I suppose that’s the overwhelming sense I have, what I got from them, the sadness and…

… read more

Dad

SoutherlyBlog3 Comments on Dad

by Stephen Sewell My father was nearly killed in a motorbike accident a month after I was born.  When he finally came to, he couldn’t recognise me or my mother and didn’t know who he was. My Aunt Mary tried to tell him, but he didn’t know who she was, either. That was the first blow my parents received. My mother returned to factory work and with the help of her family and my father’s, principally Mary, but also my other aunts, they scraped through. He eventually came home, only to suffer what the doctors called a nervous breakdown that…

… read more

Family

SoutherlyBlog2 Comments on Family

by Stephen Sewell My father had six brothers and a sister. They had big families in those days, especially the Catholics. There were eight of them in all – Browny, Noel, Tom, Trowl, Barny, Harry, Mary and my father, the youngest, Jack.  Browny was the copper, a mounted policeman out at Condoblin, Tom was the thief who served time in gaol and died spitting and cursing in a sanitorium. He was a favourite of my father’s because of his tough-man talk and claims to knowing Darcy Dugan, a notorious gunman and escape merchant of the era. Sometimes Dad would look…

… read more

Blood and Loss

SoutherlyBlog

by Stephen Sewell I suppose I’ve been a writer all my life, and it’s always been getting me into trouble. I was nearly expelled from school when I was thirteen when the school paper I was editing began an investigation of the local parish priest, and my relationship with authority has been fraught ever since. It’s not that I’m a natural rebel, I don’t think, though most children are, but that I just can’t stand being pushed around. Fundamentally, that’s what it is. So maybe I just never grew up. Of course, I don’t like hypocrisy and can’t stand inconsistency,…

… read more

The Curse

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on The Curse

Fiona Wright I was introduced over the weekend to The Curse of Mary Kielly. Mary Kielly’s curse, I was told, plagues the women of my paternal grandmother’s line, the Lightfoots, a name I’ve always loved because of another story, one that my grandmother has told since I was young. My grandmother married a Wright when she was sixteen, and for months afterwards would accidentally sign her name as Wrightfoot, the muscle-memory of her hand taking over halfway through. I was at a family wedding in Belmore, in Sydney’s Western Suburbs, in one of those specialty function centres with cubic chandeliers…

… read more

The story of that day

SoutherlyBlog2 Comments on The story of that day

Belinda Castles Just over five years ago, I decided to write a novel about my grandparents. Their names were Fay and Heinz (in the novel they became Hannah and Emil), and like so many caught up in the wars of the last century, their lives in those times were characterised by displacement and agonising separation. Heinz, a German veteran of the First World War and anti-Nazi socialist, escaped from Germany in 1933, fleeing tragedy and great personal danger. Having crossed the border into Holland and then Belgium, he met Fay, a translator, at the Maison du Peuples in Brussels, where…

… read more