Scintillae 2012

Scintillae 2012 Scintillae 2012 celebrates the contribution of writers, poets and creative thinkers to the communities of central and northern Victoria over the past decade. Scintillae 2012 is Copyright © 2012 Bendigo TAFE Bendigo TAFE 136 McCrae Street, Bendigo VIC 3550 Telephone: 1300 554 248 www.bendigotafe.edu.au Copyright is retained by individual authors. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. First published in Australia in 2012 ISBN: 978-0-646-58123-1 Printed by: Griffin Press 37—49 Browns Road, Clayton VIC 3168 Ph: (03) 9265 8252 web: www.griffinpress.com.au Cover illustration—Peter Wiseman. Visions of the Multiverse, digital montage, 2012. This anthology is dedicated to Sara Douglass (Dr Sara Warneke, 1957- 2011)—novelist, non-fiction writer, teacher and historian. She will be greatly missed by her fans and former History students, as well as by the central Victorian, Australian and international writing communities. vi - Scintillae 2012 Foreword cintillae 2012 has been put together to celebrate the contribution Sof writers, poets, creative and critical thinkers to the communities of central and northern Victoria over the past decade or so. Many of the writers featured have assisted Bendigo TAFE’s writing program over that period and thus the anthology also stands as a celebration of the often unacknowledged contribution of public arts education to this region. The diversity of literary themes explored as well as the high quality of the writing herein vindicates, I believe, the claim that community access to high quality, low cost public arts education at tertiary level is crucial to the well-being and future development of a vibrant and healthy community. Over the years Bendigo TAFE’s writing program has been supported in myriad ways by dozens of journalists, editors, poets and writers of fiction and non-fiction—some live locally, others much further afield. These professionals have nurtured our students via talks and presentations, mentoring, and editing of works in progress. We’ve also been assisted by academics at La Trobe University (Bendigo) in the disciplines of literature, film studies, philosophy, history, education and religious studies. These educators welcomed, taught and mentored our graduates as they pursued their studies (often to Honours, Masters and PhD levels). In my years as program coordinator I’ve also had the immense privilege of teaching alongside many dedicated creative arts educators (many of whom appear in this anthology). The success of the program owes a great deal to these people. I’d especially like vii to acknowledge the input over the years of three extraordinary coordinator-teachers—Justin D’Ath, Dr Geoff Russell and Dr Tom McWilliam. The writing professionals and educators discussed above all contributed their goodwill, creative energies and immense knowledge to the program such that our students received life- changing educational opportunities. It seemed appropriate, therefore, as Bendigo’s inaugural writers’ festival beckoned, to acknowledge some of these people through a quality literary anthology featuring examples of their work. As the idea grew we also decided to send out invitations to previous students of the course with a view to giving some of them the chance to appear alongside their former teachers and mentors. As a consequence around 60% of the material in Scintillae 2012 is by former students of the program. We’d love to have featured even more ex-students but the deluge of submissions as well as the anthology’s size limitations meant we had to draw a line somewhere. Although this project was initially envisaged as a literary anthology, it is a fact that over the years the PWE program at Bendigo TAFE has produced many excellent popular fiction writers, journalists and creative non-fiction writers. Since we are very proud of these graduates we also decided to include some examples of their work in the anthology. Finally, I would especially like to acknowledge the members of the publishing team, in particular my co-editors Tru Dowling and Tom McWilliam and long-term Painted Words designer/layout expert, Peter Wiseman. A dozen or so Diploma-level students (undertaking ‘Advanced Editing’ and ’Creativity in Cultural Context’) also assisted by sorting and assessing submissions, copy-editing and proofing the MS, and helping to plan aspects of the launch—Geoff Brown, Madeline Cooke, Barb Evans, Sarah Gale, Tom Levett, Anna Macgowan, Lorraine McMahon, Sarah McVeigh, John Murphy, Gail Remnant, Mitchell Roberts and Mark Sumner. David Wallace, Teaching Department Manager for Art, Music and Writing, also deserves our thanks for backing this project from its inception. Similarly, John Rossi and the Bendigo TAFE marketing team for their support in sponsoring a number viii - Scintillae 2012 of events at the festival—including this anthology’s launch. Why Scintillae? A number of people have asked me why we chose the name Scintillae for the title. The term has many layers. It appears in medieval alchemical texts (allegorical/spiritual and proto- scientific) as a phenomenon associated with the albedo stage of the opus or Great Work—the moment when sparks or tiny flashes of light (hope?) appear among the fermenting dark liquids associated with the gloominess of the preceding nigredo stage. ‘Creativity’ and ‘alchemy’, of course, have much in common, and the two words often appear together e.g. ‘creative alchemy’. Gnostic-influenced writers also used the term—their scintillae were envisaged as individual souls cut off from their true identity as aspects of the anima mundi or ‘world soul’. In the twentieth century Jung adapted these ancient usages to describe scintillae as the epiphanies that sometimes arise after periods of intense conflict between the ‘persona’ and ascending unconscious material. To him the scintillae heralded the emergence of the all- important ‘self archetype’. Many students of writing and arts programs report ‘finding themselves for the first time’ due to their studies—in an age of widespread ‘loss of soul’ and psychological fragmentation this is no small achievement! Later in the 20th century the term showed up again in theories associated with the ‘New Physics’—especially Chaos Theory. Here scintillae featured as the sub-atomic particles (or wave/ particles) at the heart of the so-called quantum revolution. More specifically, the scintillae represented the first manifestations of order and harmony after periods of chaos and entropy. Although it is not generally acknowledged, the strange behaviour associated with these marvellously ‘wilful’ scintillae became fundamental to cultural postmodernism—including literary postmodernism. We also note that in the Early Modern period it was not uncommon to describe collections of poems, writings etc. as scintillae – as flashes, sparks or fragments of insight presented in book form. The symbolism here is quite apt, since it describes well the many flashes of insight and revelation that the reader will experience in reading the works in this anthology. ix Contemporary hyper-capitalism tends to dismiss serious artistic endeavour as irrelevant to the human condition. Scientific progress and economic success alone are believed to define our general sense of community well-being. As a consequence, creative arts and humanities courses in all educational spheres are under attack and increasingly forced to prove themselves in terms of materialistic forms of measurement. The type of intense examination of self, other and cosmos on display in this anthology is increasingly likely to be dismissed as ‘of little or small account’ by some high-powered victims of what Erich Fromm termed ‘automaton conformity’. Such a judgment, of course, implicates a somewhat ironic contemporary definition of the wordscintillae — to some people whatever creative people do will only ever be of ‘small or little account’. The various avant gardes of literary history also encountered such ignorance. In times of social disintegration, alienation and decline, however, their scintillae helped initiate much-needed social and cultural change. In alchemical terminology their works became tiny, fragile sparks, flashes or flares of light (hope?) that helped illuminate the path to an exit from the general darkness. Literary scintillae may still, in times of need, suggest new ways of being, ‘worthwhile futures’, to suffering individuals and indeed to entire societies. This is the reason the creative arts and humanities remain essential to contemporary Australia-not to fuel the Gross National Product or advertise the country to possible tourists, but to promote certain life-affirming certainties, or reveries of being—certain expansive modes of consciousness— that allow us ultimately to connect more genuinely to each other and to the

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