One Writer’s Retrospect - Graham Kershaw

It was a sunny November morning in Denmark, a small, lively, arty town on the south coast of Western Australia. I was approached at a riverbank meeting by a bloke I was already slightly suspicious of: a certain Anthony Docherty. Maybe it was the sideways shuffle or the black shades, or maybe it was the goatee; or maybe it was just the fact that he was better-looking than me. Whatever the cause, the result was suspicion. Yet the guy had one hell of an idea. And the beauty of it was, he didn’t quite know what it was.
Tony asked if I wanted to take part in a trip to Ravensthorpe, a small town to the east, half-way to South Australia. A bunch of Denmark artists were heading over there in March, to ‘interact with the local community’. What would they do there, I asked. Tony shrugged, smiled his drug dealer smile (I was to learn later that he had other ones, thank God) and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ We looked at each other. He wasn’t so good-looking. ‘Give a little, to the good people there?’ he suggested. ‘See what they’re all about? Take a bit of Denmark over there? I don’t know.’ Then he showed me his empty palms and shrugged, to prove that he really didn’t have a clue what he was proposing. They were good hands, I decided. The man worked with wood.
I heard myself agree. Even Tony looked shocked.
All through my short, inglorious writing career, you see, I’d always been intensely sceptical about exchanges and festivals and programs and workshops. Especially ‘workshops’. I was a novelist; I knew my task. I’d written the job description, and it was simple: find time, and use it to write the thing you have to write. Which meant avoiding diversions like Mr Docherty.
So why had I said agreed to go, so readily? Maybe because I’d lived in Denmark twelve months and was still waiting to meet someone I disliked. Maybe because I’d never been to Ravensthorpe. Or maybe because Anthony admitted he didn’t have any better idea than I did just what an artist or writer might do there.

Anthony’s vague plans progressed, all the same, and I remained committed. But in January, a few weeks before we were due to visit, the sky fell down in Ravensthorpe: BHP announced the closure of its brand new, four billion dollar nickel project in the town. Two thousand people – most of neighbouring Hopetoun and half of Ravey – suddenly had no future there. Overnight, our project had either acquired massive new significance, or had turned into a suicide mission for the chardonnay set. Could we dare to show our faces there, at such a time? Surely, they’d have better things to do?
That wasn’t the message Anthony got on the wire. Quite the opposite. He sensed great potential. I didn’t totally disagree. I’d already read enough history to know that Ravey and Hopetoun had already survived several such catastrophes over the last century. How had they done it? What does it mean, to stay and persevere, when history turns against you and the tide of money and people suddenly and cruelly ebbs away? Could art play a role in finding new ways forward? For a second time, something told me Anthony’s judgement was right. Of course we’d still go. After all, if we’d never known what we were doing in the first place, how could it all go horribly wrong now?
And so, a month later, after a reconnoitring weekend to meet the main players, ten of us trundled over in various cars, and the local authorities drove out to meet us on the outskirts of town, to present Anthony, Nic and Virginia with their official welcoming documents: speeding fines. Then we pitched our tents and rolled out our swags in a windy field, on a farm known as Manyutup, on the outskirts of town. When the sun set, our hosts Paul and Valda joined us, along with Jenni and Richenda and others from the local arts council and community. We drank and stood, dog-tired, while the locals talked about crops and headers and people we’d never heard of. They didn’t seem to need us to say very much. We didn’t know it yet, but our work had begun.
Next morning, the wind had dropped. Beyond the paddocks, gentle, wooded hills receded in waves. This was obviously a good place. But only one of us really knew what she’d be doing all week: Gabi had heroically agreed to draw six local faces every day, assembling a collective portrait of the town over a week’s gruelling schedule. For the rest of us, give or take a few ‘workshops’ at the schools and community centre, it was going to be play it as it goes, suck it and see, sink or bloody swim. There were four musicians: Adam, Jude, Mark and Tony; another artist, Nikki; a photographer, Nic; Anthony, our sculptor; and Virginia, a writer with a roving commission. We had until Thursday to make a show.
Later that morning, in the Red Room of the old Commercial Hotel (restored into a Community Centre), I met some of the Southern Scribes, a group of local writers, all women, mostly ‘older’ (ie. older than me), and all of them cautiously curious, cautiously hopeful about this ‘writer’ on the hands. I confessed my uselessness, right up front. They all believed me. I said I’d try to help them anyway. They believed that too. Right from the start, I began to think that something good might happen.
Over the next few days, Virginia and I talked to writers, one-on-one, and read their work. The thing I most feared never happened: I never read a page without something wonderful jumping off it. And everyone seemed to leave with more energy and ideas than they had arrived with, which was odd, because the energy and the ideas had been their own.
I tried not to lie or fudge, anyway, and I never failed to care: beyond that, God knows what I did, for good or bad. But I began to scare myself with just how much these women moved me; their courage, their resilience, their hope, their curiosity, their forgiveness of my failings. I received the benefits of their doubts every day, yet I also quickly grew tired, because the barriers between writing and feeling and relating to others were quickly melting away, leaving us all exposed. I had to strive for a Victorian mixture of delicacy and directness. These women could smell bulldust from a mile, they had such a passion for the truth and so much experience; yet the situation also made them vulnerable - far more than me – their age, their work, their dreams made them so. And I was raising the stakes, asking them to take themselves and their writing seriously, to risk hoping for more, while all the time knowing, as they knew, that I’d be swanning out of town all too soon. Yet we risked a serious conversation anyway.
In the meantime, the musos had been making whoopee with the locals, playing the songs they wanted to hear by day and writing new songs about them by night. In the Red Room, Gabi drew on, past tiredness. In the stony paddocks, the graveyards and schools, Nikki rubbed parchment against headstones and railings, teaching kids along the way. Nic trawled the town for photos, accosting strangers, making tired people smile; Anthony prowled the tips and paddocks, constructing strange totems in a sheds at the farm. Our campfire never cooled; people ate with us each night. Guitar and fiddle filled the air. Mallee baked, fragments of sandalwood revealed themselves in the fire, swooningly. The fields began to feel like home.
At 2am on Tuesday, I woke to find a poem was imposing itself on me, addressed to our hostess, Valda. Once we were all up, it felt natural somehow to take it to the smouldering campfire and read it out loud. When I saw Anthony put his palm to his chest, I knew I wasn’t wasting my time. Virginia suggested intelligent changes to the structure of it, and I polished and trimmed it until it looked plausible, but then instinct made me take it back to Anthony, and the light in his drug dealer eyes assured me that I hadn’t polished it too long.
By Wednesday afternoon, I was satisfied that I’d played out my dodgy tutor role to everyone’s surfeit. I went for a walk and began to let more poems out of the bag, some addressed to other writers in the group, but also silly songs about chickens and beards, and simple lines about the sunrise and the old mines nearby. Now, I hadn’t suddenly become a poet, anymore than a tutor, a teacher or a roving ambassador for the arts. Yet I found these words tumbling out, in the simple rhymes and rhythms of popular verse and song, and they sounded to me like something I could say it to the town and be heard.
Before we knew it, it was Thursday; the final showdown loomed. Gabi filled a wall with beautiful faces, young and old; Nikki festooned the hallway of the Centre with the banners she and the children had made; Anthony installed his totems; there were slide shows, recorded songs, live music and readings planned. And amidst all this, Virginia and I pegged our little sheets of paper to a wall. To me, it looked like one of those walls people get stood up against, to be shot. Then the locals came, and the biggest shock was, they read those little pages; read them carefully, and liked what they read.
Nic held her own moving mirror to the town: a collage of local faces and places, their beauty and dignity captured, to a soundtrack of new songs about the town, the land, the sea and the sky. Magically, without planning it or discussing it, a common voice had emerged from the ten of us, singing of what transcends the tides of money and industry:
‘So it was theirs, not ours, or yours, or mine;
Mine is deep inside.
Salmon gums, the salt earth and the sky;
Mine is deep inside.
Not yours, not mine;
Not yours, not mine;
Mine is deep inside...’

After our own songs, and the songs Adam and Mark had recorded with the children at the school, the crowd gathered out in the star-roofed courtyard, where Tony and Jude played any damn thing the locals could name, while Jethro and Ronnie and Dave and other locals pitched in with accordion, fiddle and mandolin. Women I’d seen unsure about their writing or their place in life now sang their lungs out, defying their own doubts and fears, defying history and industry and time.
Crossing darkened Morgans Street for more booze, I found a half-empty pub playing mediocre songs from another time and place, and hurried back across the highway, drawn like a fish toward coral, by the biggest noise in town: ‘I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts’.
Then, after the tears and hugs and goodbyes, and one more windy night on the hill, we all got into our cars and left again, exhausted. Over the next few days, some of us found ourselves crying, for no reason, or just staring into space, as images and memories or snatches of song revisited us. They were good songs, good images, good people. We wondered if anyone in Ravensthorpe or Hopetoun felt the same. Then we got on with our busy lives, as the people in Ravey surely did. Yet it still seems like a week of significance, to me. So what did it mean?
As I said at the beginning, we didn’t really know the nature of our task until it was done. I mean, we all loaded our own agendas into our cars before going, sure, but what we pulled out afterwards looked pretty strange and new. As far as I know, none of us made or did exactly what we expected to make or do over there. And in retrospect, I sense that this difference between idea and reality, between the conscious will and actual imaginative output, became the lifeblood of the project, and the reason it left such an impact.
As a writer, I guess I’d got pretty used to thinking of my aims, ideas and methods as my own; self-generated, self-deconstructed, even if hopefully not self-serving. The work of other artists is inherently more collaborative and social, particularly that of musicians, so perhaps they had a better idea of what was coming. But for myself, it proved to be a challenge to many of my favourite preconceptions about how and why meaningful art can take place, and what it might mean when it does.
It raised questions about the relationship between creativity and community, for instance: can excessive individualism actually undercut the potency of art? Do we need to remember how to give, in order to get; in art as in life? Do the ego, the will and even the individual imagination (tin god of the art pantheon) actually need to be distorted and deformed and diverted from their conscious purpose this way, in order for artists to truly see, hear and feel the world again?
They say the proof is in the pudding, and for me, it was a hot and hearty meal. We ended up feeling more like a cooks or chemists than 'artists': every experiment generated a visible, sometimes volatile reaction, straight from the heart, tongue and aspiring mind. People are, after all, very canny in discerning your motivations, and if they find you honest, smart and kind, they will invest personal significance in shared work, which in turn will ramp up its potential meaning, as it begins to reflect and affect the way they think and feel about their own lives, and the history and fate of their communities.
Three quarters of the town was vanishing while we fiddled, remember – an emigration of plague proportions. Multitudes of friendships, fortunes, and promises and dreams were vanishing too, at a time of worldwide economic meltdown and environmental crisis. At such a time, to produce art that means anything to people, worries about lowest common denominators or ivory towers have to be shelved. The work has to be an algebraic function of its social parts, the relationships have to be personal and intimate, emotional and immediate, because there’s no time for bullshit or small talk in towns like Ravensthorpe or Hopetoun, all over the world, right now; to exist at all, art has to be a significant conversation, encultured exclusively by the histories, cultures, abilities, aspirations and imaginations of its participants; nothing more, and nothing less. As artists we have to therefore learn to stand back when others speak and sing, putting our egos in our back pocket for a while and listening, learning our own parts only as they unfold.
Hopefully, what emerged in Ravensthorpe surprised not only the visitors, but the people there too; because, let’s face it, surprise is becoming an endangered species in the managed game parks we call the Arts. Before we can hope to surprise anyone else again, perhaps we have to surprise ourselves; and our best chance of that may lie just out of sight, over the horizon, east of us.