Extract – The Last One Who Remembers
Patti Miller Allen & Unwin 1997 pg 3 - 8
Chapter One
The Murmuring Of Grandmothers: Family Gossip
'What I remember best is the murmuring of the grandmothers.' The voice
paused for a moment and I turned my head to listen. In the carriage window I
could see the reflection of two elderly women talking.
'It was a long time ago now, but that's what I remember. In the highland
village, where we had our mission, the grandmothers looked after the little
children while the parents dug in the gardens or cleared back the jungle. They
took the children down to the streams where they washed the clothes and told
stories. All day long I heard their soft voices. They told the family and tribal and
creation tales. The grandmothers kept telling the stories even while the children
played, and the children patted their grandmothers' lips and patted their own,
feeling how soft lips always are.'
'All day long I heard their soft voices,' I repeated, seeing the sound weaving
in the air like a silk tapestry. I strained to hear more of the conversation but the
voices drifted away in the roar of the train as it sped under a bridge. I leaned back
in my seat and watched the reflections of the women slide over the darkening
bush outside. The jungle had to be cleared back every day, birds-of-paradise
scratched up subsistence gardens, but grandmothers and children sat down by
streams and told stories.
Restless fragments of memory stirred and rushed forward eagerly as they
will at any vague invitation.
My grandmother murmured to me. Softly, in the dark as I lay beside her
at night, or in the harsh daylight on the plains, weaving a cocoon of family about
me. She was my mother's mother and lived on the farm with us for as long as I
could remember.
She told of her parents and how they met at the church picnic at Curra
Creek, and of her grandparents' journey from Ireland, and of her five sisters,
none of whom ever married. She described how she and her sisters milked the
cow in the backyard of their parents' hotel; and how her mother made curls of
butter every day for the dinner tables and how her father bought honey from the
Aborigines who lived in tin houses out along Bushrangers' Creek Road. She
spoke of the sailing ship with the curiously red-painted spars on which her
grandparents sailed to Australia. She repeated her grandmother's stories of an
Irish village, stony walls wet with mist. Her voice murmured over years like a
shuttle across cloth, weaving the stories of my tribe.
These are the stories I have offered to new lovers, new friends. And to my
children. Around the kitchen table, in bed, under an apple gum in the park. A
soft exchange- some laughing, some crying. I don't think I'm alone in this busy,
constant weaving.
I suppose it starts as a background fabric in which to place ourselves; we
highlight some threads, shadow others; sketch in some people and events, fill in
others with fine detail. Some weave an exotic cloth, red and gold childhoods in
tropical outposts; others offer twisted fabrics - beatings and abuse, black and
blue; still others recreate plain and warm patterns of suburbs with green
backyards, or country families lit by yellow Australian suns under azure skies.
We offer selected threads, believing our friends and lovers will see the pattern we
are offering in just the right light. But perhaps they are seeing the gaps between
words, the shadowy underside of phrases, the occasional slip of the thread. We
can never be sure that others will see the tapestry we offer. Or whether they will
believe it.
And why this offering? Is it that we need to be seen, to see ourselves
reflected in others' eyes as they gaze upon the brave recounting of a life? The
Italian writer, Primo Levi, wrote of the desolating grief experienced by human
beings when no-one will listen to their story. He was speaking, perhaps, of the
stories of experience, rather than of family background, but if I imagine for a
moment that no-one knows where I come from, no-one has ever known where I
come from, I am desolate. Nothing between myself and the vast world:
unprotected without the cloak of many coloured family stories.
And so I pull my cloak around me, trying to gather all the folds. Many of
the details have sunk to the bottom of memory, forming a kind of forest floor of
stories, dark and moist. Still, I've collected many stories, some glowing with the
patina of age and others freshly touched up, making a near impenetrable storyfabric of my being. If I were held up to the light, I think it would shine through
in a dappled pattern, and it could be seen I'm made of densely woven stories
which block and let through the light in this fashion.
There are so many metaphors of story: the tapestry, the cloak, the woven
cloth, the picture, the geographical layering of rainforests, each with a
characteristic texture. My stories are of varying textures, like a patchwork quilt.
Or like the bower of the bowerbird, less straight-edged, less connected than a
quilt. A bower is made in a clearing in the undergrowth, and shells and cicada
husks and feathers and ribbons and pieces of broken willow-ware plates are
placed within it. But if I were the bowerbird, the patchwork quilt left out in the
backyard might also be plundered and its pieces lain irregularly on the sticks of
the bower: velvet and satin and silk pieces in curious fictional shapes, everyday
cottons of family gossip, rice papers inscribed with prayers, bark paintings of
mythic tales, lacy fragments of memory, starched pieces of sermon and analysis,
silvery thread and bone of learned argument.
Gran wove the first layer of my story, made the first piece. She told me the
stories of family, of her side of the family, Reidys and Kennedys, and the
Whitehouses she had married into, and I've always felt I am from that side. The
stories she wove are my warp and weft.
`Mother's family were Kennedys. Meg and Daniel Kennedy. They came out
from Ireland, from County Cork.' Gran's voice murmured in the dark.
`Cork,' I repeated. I lay beside her in the dimness of her room and thought
of corks with matches stuck in the middle, bobbing across the ocean with tiny
people on them. They could easily have been washed overboard, or landed on
another shore. They were very lucky they had got to Australia.